


Stairway to Hell

by najio



Category: RWBY
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2018-12-06 18:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 81,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11606250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/najio/pseuds/najio
Summary: This year, Beacon's practical final exam is more of a formality than anything else. Compared to the Breach, this test is a cakewalk. That is, until the twelve first years discover an anomaly in the woods and end up miles underground. Oops?Follows Sky, Pyrrha, and Blake as POV characters. Updates Sundays.





	1. Hang on Tight

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, really quick: This is illustrated to the best of my ability, so there will be about one image per chapter for y'all to peruse at your leisure. I don't consider any of them graphic, but if you have any particular phobias or triggers you really want to avoid running across by accident, this is also on Spacebattles, which lets me put them in a spoiler that you have to click on to view them. That makes it rather a lot easier to give fair warning without accidentally spoiling chapter content.

 

The Beowolf lay motionless on the forest floor, head lolling in the dirt, neck severed almost completely by a massive axe. A massive axe which was, at the moment, stuck. It was starting to look like it would stay that way until the Grimm finished dissolving.

 

Sky tugged ineffectually on the haft of his halberd, grunting with the effort. The monster's head jerked, but the blade still didn't budge. He wasn't sure what exactly it was stuck on, probably a bit of skull or a vertebra, but it was _really_ starting to annoy him.

"Come _on_ ," he muttered under his breath, giving the axe another yank.

 

The problem, Sky thought, was that he didn't have any leverage. If he could just angle the axe head better—

 

His train of thought was cut off abruptly when a brown boot planted itself on the Beowolf's throat. Looking up, Sky saw Dove standing over the Grimm, leaning his weight on its neck.

 

 

 

Berating himself for not thinking of that sooner, Sky gave his weapon a final tug. It slid free with a gross plopping sound. He immediately overbalanced, landing on his ass with a grunt.

 

Face burning, he tilted his head back up to look at Dove. At least his partner wasn't laughing. Not openly, anyway.

 

"Thanks," Sky mumbled grudgingly, pushing himself back to his feet and dusting himself off.

 

"No problem," Dove replied, shifting his foot off the downed Beowolf.

 

Sky glanced around at the remains of the clearing his team had fought in. He let out a small sigh of relief when he saw that Cardin was leaning on a tree on the opposite side, not looking in his direction.

 

"So," he said, eager to move on to _any_ other subject. "Do you think we passed?"

 

Their professors had sent their team, along with RWBY and JNPR, to defend a village that had reported an unusually high number of Grimm in the woods. The mission was to ride an airship to the drop point, spread out a little into the forest, and kill all the monsters that had been grouping in the area. Not that difficult, as it turned out, but this was supposed to count as their practical exam for the semester, so Sky was a little worried he'd missed something.

"I killed fifteen, maybe twenty," Dove replied, shrugging. "A few Ursai, too."

 

Sky winced. The Beowolf that had caused him so much trouble had only been his eighth, though he decided not to mention that. It wasn't like they'd be graded for quantity, right? Just completion of the mission. Besides, with all twelve of them fighting in the same place, there really weren't that many Grimm to go around. Not when the other teams were such hogs, anyway.

 

"Probably passed, then," he mumbled, poking at the dead leaves beneath him with his toe. Dove wasn't that good with small talk, and Sky himself had already run out of things to say. He could _feel_ the silence growing more and more uncomfortable by the minute. Sky had just started getting desperate enough to consider commenting on the weather when he was rescued by their last teammate.

 

"Hey!" Russel called out, from somewhere in the woods.

 

Sky glanced around, tightening his grip on his halberd until Russ came crashing back into the clearing with both his daggers sheathed.

 

"What?" Cardin called out from his tree, straightening himself up to his full height.

 

"Come check this out," Russ replied, gesturing at the forest behind him.

 

"Check _what_ out?" Cardin insisted, crossing his arms in front of him. Russ just grinned.

 

"Something _weird,"_ he said, waggling his fingers in their direction.

 

Cardin snorted and marched off into the brush, pausing only to give Russel a hard punch on the arm. Sky couldn't tell if that was supposed to be friendly or aggressive—usually with guys it was the former, but Cardin was Cardin. Shrugging to himself, he followed the rest of his team into the woods. Russ had obviously strayed from the main group, which made Sky a little nervous—safety in numbers, and all that.

 

"Right here." Russ stopped several dozen paces away from the clearing. There was another dead Beowolf on the ground, black mist drifting off it as it dissolved into nothing. Sky supposed it was slightly above average sized, though there appeared to be absolutely nothing interesting about it.

 

"Seriously?" Cardin drawled, turning to glare at Russel.

 

"Look at the smoke." He pointed at the decaying corpse.

 

Sky did—and saw it almost instantly. Instead of rising up and dissipating like it normally did, the dark vapor was actually moving _down,_ curving in the air and billowing along about a foot or so off the ground.

 

"Okay?" He nudged the Grimm with his foot. "I guess that's kind of weird."

 

"Who cares?" Cardin asked, sounding annoyed. "We killed it, we passed the exam, we're leaving in a couple minutes. Case closed."

 

Sky squinted at the spot the smoke seemed to be pointing to, a mid-sized crack between two large boulders. "Uh, guys?" he said hesitantly.

 

 _"What?"_ Cardin snapped, exasperated.

 

"I think that's a cave, or something." Putting his theory to the test, Sky skirted around the dead monster on the ground and crouched down to peer into the hole. It went on for a few feet, before becoming too dark for him to see any farther. He shivered, hopefully not violently enough for his friends to notice.

 

"We should report that," Dove decided, eying the opening with deep mistrust.

 

"Let's not," Cardin said flatly. "They're only going to make us do extra paperwork. And by us, I mean me." He turned and smirked at Sky. "And by _me,_ I mean _you."_

 

Dove gave their leader a sharp look—not that Cardin seemed to notice. A sharp look from Dove was hard to tell apart from his regular expression. It was probably something to do with his squint.

 

"We might as well check it out," Russ insisted. "Then book it if we find any Grimm."

 

Cardin just grunted. "Whatever."

 

Sky shifted nervously as Russ and Cardin led the way into the cave. He himself went third, with Dove at his back. The safest part of the formation by far, but he couldn't help the cold feeling in his stomach. Then again, if all went well the four of them wouldn't even be able to _fit_ in such a small cave.

 

They kept going a little farther—it seemed like there was a narrow space in between the rocks, just large enough for Cardin to squeeze through if he turned himself sideways. For a moment, Sky inched forward through near-total darkness, trying to ignore the cobwebs and insects clinging to the stone above his head.

 

He fully expected each step to be the last, until Cardin shifted so that he was standing fully upright. The beam of Russel's flashlight shot through the space between his back and the rocks, revealing nearly thirty feet of craggy stone floor before it was swallowed up by the darkness. There was a moment of silence, as the four of them stared in disbelief at the massive cave they'd just found.

 

"Okay," Cardin said finally. "Maybe we should report this."

 

"Yeah, and let's get some backup," Russel added.

 

"What?" Cardin turned his head to stare at them. "Why? It's completely empty."

 

Sky gaped back at his leader, mouth actually falling open.

 

"If _that_ doesn't have Grimm in it," Russel said, scanning the shadowy tunnel with his flashlight, "I'll propose to Scarlatina."

 

"We have no idea what's down there," Sky agreed.

 

Cardin glanced back at the wall of darkness. "Yeah, so we message the teachers and go in by ourselves."

 

 _Are you insane?!_ Sky did _not_ ask, though he suspected Russ and Dove were thinking the same thing.

 

"Dude," Russel said, waving the flashlight back and forth as if to emphasize the heavy gloom that swallowed the end of the cave. "Look at this! Do you _want_ to go down there alone?"

 

"We don't need their help," Cardin insisted. Sky had to fight the urge to groan.

 

"There is safety in numbers," Dove pointed out.

 

"Yeah," Russ said, nodding emphatically. "Better them than us." Cardin glared at him for a moment, before relenting.

 

"Fine," he grunted, seeing that he was outvoted. Sky suspected that he wasn't all that eager to go down in that cave alone either, even if he wouldn't be caught dead admitting it.

 

Honestly, Sky _wanted_ to suggest that they call it in and let the teachers deal with it, or their crazy classmates. Instead he just sighed, knowing that he'd never hear the end of it if he did. Besides, it wasn't like there would be more Grimm in the tunnel than there were outside—the entrance was way too small for even a Beowolf to get through, and there wasn't any reason the monsters would pack themselves into an underground cave instead of staying in the forest where all the tasty villagers were. It was _fine._

 

Finally, with a lot of shuffling around in the dark, and yelling for Russel to maybe shine the light somewhere _useful_ for a second _,_ they managed to turn themselves around so that Dove was at the front of the group. After that it wasn't long before they emerged back into the forest.

 

"I'll get the other teams," Russel offered, as soon as he was past the entrance. Cardin scowled, obviously annoyed, but waved him off. He then started dialing the headmaster, putting his scroll to his ear and seating himself on a nearby log.

 

"Professor Ozpin?" he asked, after a moment.

 

"This is Cardin Winchester." Another pause, as something muffled was said on the other end of the line.

 

"The mission was a success, but we found an anomaly in the woods.

 

"One of the Grimm was dissolving, and the smoke it made seemed to be going into a cave.

 

"Yes sir, it was a lot deeper than it looked." Sky suppressed the urge to chuckle at the idea of Cardin calling anyone _sir._

 

"Understood.

 

"Yes, Russel is going to get them now.

 

"Understood."

 

Cardin hung up, and grunted again. "He told us to get the other teams and investigate, and that we should be careful and not go too far in." He rolled his eyes.

 

Sky definitely didn't mind _any_ of those orders, other than maybe the investigating part, though he didn't say that out loud. It wasn't long after that before Russel returned, leading the rest of their class behind him. Their fellow first-years stood in a loose semi-circle, looking at him and Cardin with varying levels of distaste, discomfort, and soul-crushing awkwardness.

 

 _They're good in a fight,_ Sky chanted to himself. _They're good in a fight, they're good in a—_

 

"Uh, hi!" Ruby chirped, bouncing slightly on her heels. Sky squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed a groan.

 

"What did Russ tell you guys?" asked Dove, ignoring her embarrassing greeting entirely. Dove tended to do that, which was one of the things Sky liked most about his partner.

 

"Not much. Just that there was a cave over here, and he was waving his arms around a lot, and, uh..." She trailed off, glancing behind her at her team.

 

"See that Beowolf over there?" Dove pointed. "The smoke it's making isn't going up like it usually does. It's being pulled into this cave, somehow."

 

"Uh, what?" Jaune blurted, craning his neck to look at the cave. "Is that normal?" Russ snorted derisively.

 

"No," Nikos replied. "It's very odd, in fact. I've never heard of something like this happening before."

 

"I called the headmaster," Cardin said curtly. "We're supposed to look around a little, then come back up and report what we find."

 

"How much is 'a little'?" Russel asked. His partner shrugged.

 

"Until we see something weird, I guess."

 

"Sounds simple enough," Ruby's sister said, cracking her knuckles.

 

"Who's going first?" asked Jaune.

 

"We found it," Cardin asserted. "So, me." Sky swore viciously under his breath.

 

Some of the others looked like they were about to protest, but Cardin was already ducking into the cave entrance. The rest of team CRDL followed, though Sky was less than happy about being near the front of the group.

 

To his surprise, he found that it was kind of funny hearing the rest of their year gasping in shock as the space widened. The feeling was dampened considerably as they continued forward, especially when Russ moved to walk side by side with Cardin and Sky found himself right behind the front line.

 

His halberd shook in his hands as he walked, eyes scanning from left to right, and his nerves were fraying rapidly. It was just the dark, really. There wasn't any sign of the Grimm, but it was so oppressively _creepy_ in here, he couldn't think straight. Especially when there were so many bugs on the walls, crawling around and making weird shadows when Russel's light passed over them. He was tempted to start humming, just to lighten the mood, but he stayed quiet. There was nothing to be scared of, he wasn't going to run away crying just because it was _dark._

 

They walked in relative silence for what felt like an eternity. Occasionally someone, usually Ruby, would make some random comment or joke. But for the most part, all conversation was swallowed up by the gloom.

 

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the cave widened. Sky first noticed when he realized that Cardin, the tallest of all of them, had nearly a foot of empty space over his head. The walls were father apart, as well, so much so that Dove had moved up next to Russel, so that any Grimm they fought couldn't slip past him and Cardin.

 

Instead of easing his nerves, the new space made the tunnel seem somehow even more claustrophobic. Russ was still the only one with a flashlight out, and the dark seemed to press in on all sides, driven back only in a pale cone in front of them. Shadows clung thicker than ever to the walls, and he started wondering if maybe there were other passages branching off of this one, going entirely unseen as an unlucky twitch of Russel's arm moved the light away for just one second...

 

Sky shuddered. He'd never liked being underground, or the dark, really. Still, he didn't seem to be the only one feeling uncomfortable. Belladonna was looking pretty tense, so he _couldn't_ be the only one.

 

He'd barely even finished the thought when the girl in question spoke. "Something's coming," she said abruptly, raising her weapon in front of her.

 

Before Sky could demand to know how she knew that, he started to hear it too. A long, low, scraping noise, like heavy furniture being moved over concrete. It came from somewhere in the cave ahead, hidden in darkness.

 

His halberd was shaking again. "What _is_ that?!" he demanded, flinching as his frightened voice reached his own ears.

 

Cardin glared at him. "A Grimm. Need a diaper change, Sky?"

 

"Not now," Dove snapped, without taking his eyes off the passage ahead. "Russ, can you give me some more light over here?"

 

The boy obliged, angling the flashlight so that it pointed straight down the tunnel. And, just like that, Sky could see two gleaming points of white in the dark where the light reflected off the creature's eyes. As they came closer, and the scraping sound grew louder, he could see the color deepening to its true red hue.

 

 _Calm down,_ he chided himself. _You already knew it was a Grimm. This isn't news._

 

"You want some?!" Russel called, crouching in place with a dagger in each hand. Behind him, Sky could see the others practically champing at the bit to get at the mysterious and possibly deadly creature hiding in the dark. Ruby's sister was actually _smiling._

 

 _Lunatics,_ he thought frantically. _All of them are complete lunatics._

 

The eyes drew closer, and yet closer—and then, just like that, they were gone. Sky had never in a million years thought he'd be in the position of _wanting_ to see a Grimm's eyes in the dark.

 

"Where'd it go?" asked Nora, sounding almost _disappointed_.

 

Russel flicked the flashlight wildly back and forth, making the shadows jump and writhe.

 

"Russ!" Cardin shouted. "Stop moving the damn light so much, we can't—"

 

"It's on the ceiling!" Belladonna cried out, and shot her weapon up above them.

 

Sky jerked in place, craning his neck to see a pair of gleaming red eyes hovering above him. Russel caught up with the light a second later, revealing six legs with far too many joints, a bone-white mask and a pair of slavering mandibles.

 

Weapons began discharging almost at once. Sky fumbled with his axe, finally managing to find the trigger for the rifle part of it. There was a loud click as it chambered a round, and then he was pointing it up above him, and gunshots were going off in the cave and the noise was _deafening_ , he couldn't _think._

 

"Wait!" someone shouted, though he couldn't pick out who it was. Russ was doing his best to keep the light trained on the Grimm, but that also meant that Sky could barely see his classmates.

 

There was a mighty _crack,_ probably Ruby's insane weapon going off. Then Belladonna screamed, "Look out!" which Sky thought was _extremely_ unhelpful since Russ was useless with a flashlight and he couldn't see _anything._

 

It became obvious, though, when he heard something screech _right behind him,_ and as he whirled around he was nearly deafened by a series of wails and screams that were so horribly inhuman that he could feel his insides turning to mush from fright.

 

Then, all of a sudden, the noise stopped. For an instant all he could hear was the heavy breathing of his classmates all around him. Then, Russ finally got his shit together, and found the Grimm's slowly dissipating corpse. It looked quite a lot a giant ant, and for a while they all just _stared_ at it. Port had never mentioned anything of its kind, before, and his class was supposed to cover every known type of Grimm native to Vale.

 

"Russ," Cardin said, eventually. "Would you mind pointing that thing down the tunnel, and _not_ at the ground?"

 

"Hang on," Ruby muttered, rifling through her pack. "I think I have one too, right... in..."

 

"Here," her partner said flatly, clicking on her own flashlight and passing it over.

 

"Or that."

 

"Guys, look," Ruby's sister blurted, bending down to peer at something on the ground. Sky walked over to see what she was pointing at. The vapor flaking off the dead Grimm was acting oddly, just like it had on the surface.

 

"It's going down the passage," Belladonna observed. Sky blinked, then noticed that it was true. Her partner even stuck her hand in the smoke's path, and it billowed around the obstacle and continued further into the cave.

 

"I vote we go check out what it's heading towards," Ruby decided.

 

"Can we not?" Sky asked, a bit shakily. "I'd really rather _avoid_ dying horribly in the dark."

 

"We can go a little farther, at least," Belladonna agreed, ignoring him entirely. "As far as we know, no one has ever seen Grimm essence moving in a specific direction like this before. There could be valuable information about them in this cave."

 

"Yeah," Russ said. "Or some giant uber-Grimm that tears us to pieces."

 

"We _are_ training to be hunters," observed the Schnee. "It's our job to investigate anomalies like this."

 

"I would like to find out what is causing this as well," Nikos chipped in. There were murmurs of assent from some of the others.

 

"I hate all of you," countered Russel obstinately.

 

"The feeling is mutual," Belladonna snapped back, her amber eyes flashing in the gloom.

 

"Okay!" Ruby interrupted, before they could start arguing in earnest. "All in favor, say aye!"

 

To Sky's complete lack of surprise, all three of her teammates and team JNPR agreed almost at once. Cardin chipped in as well, somewhat reluctantly.

 

"Aye," said Dove. Sky shot his partner a look of betrayal, to which the other boy just shrugged. "I feel it's our responsibility to try and learn all we can about the Grimm. It's humanity's lack of knowledge that often puts us at a disadvantage against them, after all."

 

"Well, I'm _not_ going down there," Sky insisted.

 

"Don't be such a wimp," said Cardin snidely. Sky bit his lip, hoping it was too dark for the others to see his face burning with shame.

 

"Fine," he grumbled. "You're all crazy."

 

"Not me," Russ said. "I hate this plan."

 

"You're welcome to stay behind while the rest of us investigate," Schnee offered, though her tone was anything _but_ pleasant.

 

Russel bristled. "Like I'd let _you_ get the glory."

 

 _Idiots,_ Sky realized. _We go to a school for idiots and lunatics._ Then again, he was going _with_ them, so he didn't have much room to talk. Not that hanging around topside in a possibly-still-Grimm-infested forest by himself was any better. Even if he could somehow convince Dove and Cardin to abandon their duty and suicidal pride respectively, he didn't like the idea of splitting the group. So, Sky was along for the ride—and besides, he _was_ curious about whatever was going on with the dissolving Grimm. He just didn't want to die trying to find out.

 

A few dozen steps down the tunnel, and Sky started digging around in his own backpack for a flashlight. Being able to point the light wherever he was looking did wonders for his nerves, as he scanned any spot that the other two may have passed over for cave branches or lurking Grimm.

 

His hand was shaking, though, badly enough that he could see the light bouncing back and forth. He played it off, whipping the light around to make circles on the walls. If he moved fast enough, the trail of light would form a glowing picture. Sky drew a little light star on the floor in front of him, then morphed it into a hexagon. Granted, his hexagon looked a lot more like a lumpy circle than anything else, but that was more the flashlight's fault than his own.

 

Suddenly daring, he tried pointing it at Cardin, and found himself grinning despite the creepy atmosphere when he saw that the light had bounced off his polished armor and landed on Russ's chest. Changing the angle sent the reflection sliding off of Russel and onto Dove's shoulder.

 

Pointing the beam at Nikos produced similar results, though the light went cherry red and made the tunnel look somehow even eerier than it already was. He moved on quickly, pausing to make a figure eight around Dove's ankles. His partner turned to glance back at him, and Sky thought he could see the ghost of a smile on his face. The sight spurred him on, and he started chasing some of the others.

 

He found that Belladonna was less interesting—her clothing seemed to swallow up the light. Her partner, on the other hand, got these awesome highlights in her hair. It looked a little like her head was on fire.

 

"Would you stop that?" Schnee scolded him, and he nearly jumped right out of his skin. "You're wasting the light." Sky pointed his flashlight at her.

 

Honestly, he'd just wanted to annoy her. But when the light hit her, and her white jacket, white skirt, white skin, white _hair_... her whole body practically _glowed_. With how small and willowy she was, she looked like a ghost. Obviously the others could see it too—Russ didn't hesitate at all in bursting out laughing. Her face flushed an angry red at that, which sort of ruined the image.

 

For a second, Sky thought that would be the end of it. Then, Jaune spoke up.

 

"See?" he said, as if he'd just proved an irrefutable fact. "You totally look like a Snow Angel!"

 

That was all her teammates could take. Ruby at least tried not to laugh. Her sister _cackled._ Sky himself kept a mostly straight face, because the Schnee's expression had morphed from embarrassed to downright apocalyptic.

 

He turned the flashlight to face forward again, though he couldn't resist adding a little flourish as he passed Dove. It wasn't shaking anymore, either. He was still scared stiff, but the momentary distraction had helped settle his nerves.

 

The other two teams started chatting a bit after that. Sky imagined he could sense an undertone of nervousness in the banter, but he was probably projecting.

 

As he walked, he shifted across the cave so that he was standing at Dove's elbow, and shot a glance at his partner. Dove seemed to understand, which was pretty impressive since Sky himself had no idea what he was looking for at the moment. He gave him a reassuring smile, and a light thump on the arm. Grinning, Sky rested his halberd against his shoulder, determined to milk this new confidence boost for all it was worth.

 

It was nice, having the other teams talking in the background. Silence technically would have been better, since it was harder to listen for threats, but the murmur of noise in the background did a lot to ease the tension. Sky had always been the type to sit and listen to other people pal around, and this was sort of the same thing. He wasn't eavesdropping or anything, it was just that when people talked around him, he liked to listen. Like reading a book, only there were real people involved.

 

They were discussing the Breach, of course. It seemed like that was all anyone could talk about, recently. Cardin was still bitter about not getting back from their mission in time to participate, though Sky himself was secretly grateful. Vale was supposed to be _safe,_ and then a horde of Grimm breaks right into the center of the city? Not to mention the fact that team RWBY had apparently been there, as in _on the train, fighting Roman Torchwick._ His classmates really were insane, sometimes. He was a bit surprised they were still alive.

 

With that morbid thought, he found his morale boost had been thoroughly crushed. Instead of bothering Dove again, he tried to think of some way to distract himself. He didn't want to do the flashlight thing again and risk the wrath of Schnee, though.

 

Instead he used an old trick, and counted squares in his head. It was hard enough that it did its job distracting him, while still being comforting and familiar. The usual one, four, nine, sixteen, twenty five, all the way to two-twenty-five all went by in a blur, having been memorized long ago. Next was sixteen squared... he wasn't sure about that one. So he tried his usual method. Twenty squared was four hundred, and sixteen was twenty minus four. Any number minus another number squared would be the first number squared, minus two times the second—

 

Sky bounced off something hard, blinking and shaking his head to clear it. Cardin _glowered._

 

"Sorry!" he blurted, stepping back so quickly he nearly tripped.

 

"What's your problem?" the taller boy demanded, still glaring. "Do you _want_ to get eaten, or something?"

 

"I was just—" he tried to say, only for his voice to die in his throat.

 

"Some huntsman, spacing out in the middle of a mission," Cardin sneered.

 

"Cardin," Dove warned, stepping between them. "That's enough."

 

The others had broken of their conversation and were staring. Jaune in particular was giving him a look that fell somewhere between pity and empathy. Sky felt himself flush, and locked his gaze on his boots, halberd held tightly in his hands. He wasn't sure if what he was feeling was anger or shame. That expression... it was the sort of look you'd give a victim, like a kicked puppy or a crying baby. Something helpless and sad that you wanted to give a nice hug to cheer it up. Anger, then.

 

"What?" Cardin drawled. "The guy's going to get himself killed doing that." He and Dove were moving closer, almost within shoving distance. Russel glanced between them, like a spectator at a tennis match, fists clenching impotently.

 

"He already apologized," Dove insisted. His hand went to his sword, ready for a fight.

 

"Guys!" Russ broke in, a desperate edge to his voice. "There's a fork up ahead." He shone his light back and fourth, highlighting two separate tunnels branching out from the one they were in.

 

"Which way?" he asked.

 

Cardin gestured at the right-hand tunnel. "That one angles down. If there's some kind of Grimm magnet or whatever buried in this cave, it'd probably be pretty deep."

 

"We won't know for sure until we have a dead Grimm to check," Ruby said. "It's probably better if we just set up camp here until one of them show up." Cardin scowled at her.

 

 _"That's_ your plan?" Russ replied incredulously. "Wait for something to attack us?"

 

"It's going to happen anyway," Dove countered. "We've already seen that there are Grimm here. This way we can use them as... a sort of compass, I suppose."

 

"Not a bad idea," Schnee said, mostly to herself. "Though we should remember to mark which way we went, in case our professors need to find us."

"So... lunch break?" Nora asked cheerfully. The girl seemed to do _everything_ cheerfully, and Sky was beginning to wonder how the rest of her team ever survived dealing with her early in the morning.

 

Cardin dumped his pack unceremoniously on the floor. They'd been ready to stay overnight, if the Grimm pack had proved hard to find. It _hadn't,_ but that meant they still had their bedrolls and sleeping bags tucked neatly away in their packs. Or in Russel's case, crumpled up and stuffed in at the top so that it was hanging out a bit. Once spread out, they made excellent seats, even on the rough stone ground.

 

It also turned out that Lie had brought hot dogs, in case their mission had run long. They didn't have any wood for a fire, but Schnee provided a bit of Dust—which was horribly unsafe, as she told them several times before being badgered into it by Ruby—and the brief but violent blaze let Lie produce an edible, though rather charred, barbecue.

Sky set himself up between Dove and Russ, hoping to avoid any more confrontation. Between dealing with Cardin and weird looks from Jaune, he just didn't have the energy.

 

 _Fuck it,_ he thought. After stripping off his armor, he dumped his sleeping bag on the floor and collapsed on top of it. He ate his food in three massive bites, wincing as the crispy skin burned his tongue and the cold, mushy insides slid unpleasantly down his throat.

 

A rustling noise beside him caught his attention, and he pushed himself upright. Russ was seated on his own bedroll, squinting at a text book he'd laid out in front of him and scribbling away on a sheaf of paper balanced on his knee.

 

"Are you doing _homework?"_ asked an incredulous voice from behind them.

 

Sky craned his neck to look backwards, and saw the Schnee standing there, one hand on her hip. He wondered idly if she practiced that move in the mirror—it looked like something she did a lot.

 

"It's not like there's anything _else_ to do," Russel shot back. Sky fought down a grin—Russ was sort of funny when he got defensive.

 

Schnee didn't seem to know what to say to that, so she just scoffed haughtily and turned to go. Then, over her shoulder, she said, "Number five is wrong, by the way."

 

Russel flushed, all the way from the tip of his ears to the base of his neck. "Who asked _you?"_ he snarled, hunching over to hide the offending worksheet from view. The heiress just rolled her eyes and walked away.

 

Sky could swear his teammate was just moments away from having steam come out of his ears. "Give it here," he sighed. Russ handed it over reluctantly.

 

Number five was indeed wrong. It was something to do with the tendons in Nevermore wings, and Russ had responded with a bone only present in Creeps. Still, she didn't have to be a bitch about it.

 

"Check chapter six," Sky said quietly. "Section... nine, I think? It should have a diagram of the wing."

****

"Thanks," Russ grumbled back. He was sulking, but at least now he wouldn't have to lose points for it.

 

Sighing again, Sky settled back onto his makeshift mattress. It was times like this, the empty moments between flurries of action, where he felt himself... drifting. His eyes shut, only to slide open again. He wasn't tired. Not physically, anyway. Just... lethargic.

 

For a moment, Sky considered starting a conversation with Dove. It would make him feel better, he knew, but neither of them were really comfortable talking in front of Cardin. The guy was a dick, there was no denying it. Unless your name happened to be Russel, of course.

 

"You know why they're called stalactites?" someone said suddenly, shattering the silence. Sky looked up, and saw Ruby's sister leaning on one wall, staring up at the roof of the cave. She was wearing a strange expression, somewhere between pensiveness and a smirk.

 

"No." Belladonna drawled. Her partner ignored her entirely.

 

"'Cause they've got to hang on _tight."_

 

_Did she just—_

 

"Boo!" Nora called out, confirming that _yes,_ she _did_ just make that pun.

 

Sky felt a grin spreading across his face.

 

"I'd tell you to go to hell for that," he said conversationally. "But I'm pretty sure we passed it a few minutes ago."

 

Yang gave a theatrical gasp. "You're just jealous of the talent I've been granite!"

 

Her sister groaned.

 

"L'I'm so not stoned enough for this," he shot back.

 

Beside him, Dove made an odd noise somewhere between a snort and a grunt. Sky's smile widened.

 

"I think I'm marbleous," Yang crooned.

 

"Please stop," Belladonna said, trying and failing to hide a muffled chortle.

 

"So serious," Sky retorted. "Practically stonefaced."

 

"I hate both of you," Russ informed them, in the kind of tone most people would use to talk about the weather.

 

"I guess we do have a bit of a rocky relationship," Yang admitted.

 

"Everyone's a critic," Sky observed. "I think we're on a roll."

 

"You know what they say," she said airily. Sky smirked.

 

"A rolling stone gathers no moss?" They said, in unison. Their eyes met, both of them wearing identical shit-eating grins.

 

Then her face fell, and her eyes slid away from his to rest on the laces of her boots. The mood sobered up almost instantly, and Sky felt his own smile fading.

 

 _Right,_ he thought. _She hates me._

 

He'd forgotten about that.


	2. Forgotten Under the Surface

 

Pyrrha sighed as she leaned against the rough stone behind her, a small smile tugging at her lips. It was more comfortable than it had any right to be, sitting in a damp cave like that. She and her partner had offered to keep watch while the others napped—it had been hours, by that point, and still no sign of any Grimm.

 

Beside her, Jaune was staring off into space with his flashlight held loosely at his side. Their arms were just barely touching, but she could feel the warmth of him through his hoodie. It was nice.

 

"Jaune?" she asked, breaking the companionable silence.

 

"Huh?" he blurted.

 

Pyrrha giggled. "I was just wondering what you were thinking about."

 

He blinked, bewildered. "Nothing," he said quickly. Then, after a moment, "I was remembering that Grimm. Did I miss a lesson, or...?"

 

Pyrrha shook her head. "I've never heard of it, and Professor Port didn't cover it in his class. It could be a new breed, or an old one no one's encountered before."

 

"Do you think there will be more of them?" Jaune was frowning, a row of tiny wrinkles standing out on the bridge of his nose.

 

"If there are, I'm sure we'll be a match for them," she reassured him. "The one we fought before didn't seem particularly strong."

 

He smiled—a weak smile, but gratifying nonetheless. "Thanks, Pyrrha."

 

She found herself grinning back at him, almost without realizing it. His happiness was infectious.

 

Pyrrha was suddenly hyperaware of his arm against hers, the lack of space between them, and how quiet it was in the cave. All she could hear was the sound of their friends' breathing—and team CRDL, she supposed. She wanted to rest her head on his shoulder, to close her eyes and drift to sleep.

 

"What are you thinking about?" Jaune asked.

 

"O-oh!" she stammered. "I was wondering what might be causing the Grimm essence to be drawn down here in the first place." Judging by the look on his face, Jaune had been thinking something similar—even if Pyrrha hadn't.

 

"Maybe it's... I don't know, a mother Grimm?" he suggested, then winced. It wasn't a pleasant idea.

 

"Or," she said, hoping to ease the sudden tension, "It could be some kind of ancient artifact. Knowledge is often lost when cities are overrun by Grimm, and it's possible that early civilizations knew things about them that we don't."

 

"I guess there's no point worrying about it until we know more. You're... really good at the whole optimism thing, aren't you?"

 

Pyrrha beamed. "I like cheering you up," she replied, watching his expression carefully for a response. It came in the form of a wide, open smile that made her insides squirm. No wide-eyed recognition, and no sign that he'd gotten the hint. She let out a long, steady breath, doing her best to quell the slight tinge of frustration. It wasn't his fault, anyway.

 

"Hey, Pyrrha?" he began, after a moment of silence. "Do... do you think I—"

 

"Wait," she hissed, holding up one hand. He jolted in place, startled, until she got to her feet and settled into a crouch.

 

Something dark was slithering around in the back of her mind, tingling on the back of her neck. Pyrrha brought up her flashlight, shooting the beam down the tunnel to her left. Jaune made to follow her, but she shook her head and gestured down the other passageway.

 

For an instant, everything was still and silent. Then, her flashlight caught the edge of something and a dim glimmer reflected off a smooth, hard surface.

 

"Grimm!" Jaune shouted, switching his flashlight to his left hand and drawing his sword in a single, smooth motion. Pyrrha dropped her own light, readying both her weapons and charging forward.

 

The others were only just kicking their way free of their sleeping bags and fumbling for their weapons when the Deathstalker skittered into the light. Its red eyes gleamed hungrily, pincers snapping as it approached.

 

Pyrrha stepped forward and eyed the monster warily from behind Akoúo. It was smaller than the one they'd fought in initiation, but she still wasn't sure how long she could hold it off by herself.

 

The Grimm jabbed experimentally at her shield with one pincer, a light attack that was easy to parry. It shuffled backwards then, looking steadily at her—and charged.

 

It's sudden speed caught Pyrrha completely off guard, and she struggled to keep both its pincers and tail away from her long enough to attack back. But after one punishing overhead blow from its stinger, which she managed to dodge without using her shield, she saw an opening and slammed her javelin straight into its face.

 

She'd been aiming for the eyes, but the creature squealed and jerked away just in time, so that the strike glanced off its armored mask instead. Even so, the bone plating cracked and split, and black ichor began oozing from the wound. Pyrrha was surprised despite herself—obviously its smaller size meant it had lighter armor, because she was sure she'd done something similar to the Deathstalker at initiation and dealt little to no damage.

 

Her opponent screeched and wailed, but did not attack. Instead it fell back, placing one pincer in front of its injured face. Pyrrha was used to Grimm being more impulsive, bloodthirsty fighters, but this one was rather timid.

 

The extra breathing room was certainly welcome. Its initial onslaught had forced her to stagger backwards more than once, and she had to keep the creature away from the camp until the others were geared up and ready.

 

Chancing a glance behind her, Pyrrha saw that Blake was already running up to join the fight. Ren and Nora weren't far behind, though most of team CRDL were still struggling with their armor.

 

In the instant her attention was diverted, the Deathstalker in front of her tried to capitalize on the opening. By the time it closed the distance, Pyrrha was already facing it once again, shield at the ready.

 

The Grimm had no chance to reconsider its attack—it was already within her reach. Miló lashed out, catching one of the monster's legs and severing it entirely. As it snapped at her, Blake dashed forward and landed a slash right across its eyes.

 

Then, the light behind them began flickering wildly. "There's another one over here!" Jaune called. "I can't see it!"

 

Another flashlight flickered to life, pointing at the Deathstalker in front of Pyrrha.

 

"I got the other side lit," Sky called.

 

"Fucking straps!" Cardin snarled, and Pyrrha could hear a metallic clang somewhere behind her.

 

By then, Yang had already reached where Pyrrha and Blake were fighting. There was no sign of Ren and Nora on their side—they'd probably decided to reinforce Jaune instead.

 

The injured Deathstalker backpedaled clumsily, doing its best to compensate for its missing leg. Pyrrha and Yang ran after it, and Sky's muffled cursing could be heard as he jogged to keep up with them. The light bobbed up and down, casting strange shadows over their opponent, but he kept it trained on the Deathstalker.

 

That was, until he didn't. All Pyrrha heard was a muffled thump and a barked curse, and then the flashlight beam careened wildly off to the right, eventually settling on the floor. She could just barely make out the monster's legs undulating in the dark, heading straight for them.

 

For a second, Pyrrha's heart jerked into her throat. Shield raised, she strained her eyes for any sign of the creature's advance. All she could see were writhing shadows, and then a flurry of noise, clashes of metal on bone. There was a feminine cry of pain as something dark slammed into the wall beside her. And light _exploded_ back into being.

 

Yang bulled into the injured Deathstalker, flaming hair illuminating the passage better than the flashlight ever had, fists flying into the vulnerable joints of its armor plating.

 

"Get back!" she shouted, and jabbed at the monster's face. It tried to block with one of its pincers, but the attack smashed through its parry and into the mask over its eyes. The punch pulped its head, and it collapsed to the ground, already dissolving into black smoke.

 

Red eyes faded back into lilac for an instant, before the passageway went black again. Then someone pointed a light down the tunnel, and Pyrrha finally figured out what had just happened.

 

As she turned around, she was nearly blinded again by the light Russel was holding with shaking hands. Just in front of him, Blake was sprawled against the cave wall, with her weapon lying several feet away. Even from this distance, Pyrrha could see a thin line of blood running down her forehead.

 

To her surprise, Russel was already in the process of tossing his light to Sky and kneeling down next to Blake. He reached out to feel for a wound—and Pyrrha could hear her own warning mixing with Yang's as both of them tried to avert the impending disaster.

 

His hand landed clumsily on the top of Blake's bow, even as she tried to flinch away. The way his eyes widened would have been comical, if circumstances were different.

 

"You're a _faunus?!"_ he shouted, before any of them could so much as move. Sky dropped the flashlight again.

 

An second passed in frozen silence, and the only sound was Blake's harsh breathing. Sky eventually snapped out of it, and began fumbling for the light.

 

"A little to your left," Blake said.

 

"Thanks," Sky mumbled back.

 

"Are you okay?" Yang asked, crouching next to her partner.

 

"Fine, I think. A bit of a headache, but my aura took most of the hit."

 

"I'm an _idiot."_ Russel managed, seeming to snap back into reality all at once. "I can't _believe_ I didn't see that!"

 

"Russ," Sky hissed. "Shut up!"

 

"We're all clear," said a very familiar voice. Cardin came swaggering up to them a moment later, his mace slung over one shoulder. Dove was next to him.

 

"Good!" Yang chirped, with feigned cheer. "So how about we just get out of here and—"

 

"Didn't see what?" Dove asked, tilting his head curiously at Russel.

 

Pyrrha made to do something—she wasn't sure what, maybe clamp a hand over his mouth—but she was too far away.

 

"She's a faunus!" Russel blurted, waving a hand at Blake. She'd closed her eyes at some point, and was wearing an expression somewhere between resignation and dread.

 

"What?!" Cardin half-shouted, staring at Blake as if she'd grown an extra head.

 

"She's got ears man!" Russel bounced up and down on his heels. "Under the— _Ah!"_

 

Yang smiled sweetly, an expression only made more terrifying by the fact that she was holding Russel tightly by the ear. "Is that gonna be a problem?"

 

"Guys..." Sky said halfheartedly.

 

"Seriously?!" Cardin demanded, taking a step forward. Dove stayed quiet, but the disdainful look on his face spoke volumes. "We're stuck down here with a—"

"Cardin!"

 

Pyrrha stared in shock as Sky turned to look pleadingly at his leader.

 

"Not here, okay?" he said, holding his hand out as if to placate a truculent bear. Dove's expression softened noticeably, but Cardin seemed unmoved.

 

"You're telling me she's been faking it this _whole time?"_ he spat, taking another step forward. Yang made as though to meet him, hair beginning to glow dangerously. Pyrrha was stuck in place—she wanted to say something, but the tension in the air was so thick that she found herself unable to move.

 

Behind Cardin, Pyrrha saw Jaune jogging toward them, only to skid to a stop as he took in the tense scene. He cast a bewildered glance at her, but she could only shake her head, equally lost.

 

"Back off!" Yang growled, making Jaune's eyes widen even further.

 

"Cardin, please calm down," Sky pleaded.

 

 _"What_ did you just say?"

"Look around!" Sky gestured wildly at his surroundings. "We can't argue about this now! If we start fighting, we could _die!"_ Yang cracked her knuckles.

 

"Speak for yourself," Cardin scoffed. _"You_ might be willing to let some _animal_ and a bunch of idiots do your fighting for you, but _I'm_ just fine on my own."

 

"Cardin, maybe we should—" Russel started, but his partner bowled right over him.

 

"Is that it?" Cardin jeered, taking another step toward his teammate. "Gonna hide behind her like a _coward?_ Like a weak, sniveling little _baby?"_

 

Sky flinched backwards, dropping his gaze. Cardin shoved him, hard enough that he lost his balance and nearly fell over. Yang took a threatening step towards Cardin—but someone else got there first.

 

Dove, who had been watching with a seemingly impassive expression up until then, lashed out and grabbed Cardin by the front of his armor. With a jarring _clang,_ he slammed his leader against the cave wall with one hand, drew back the other and punched him right in the nose.

 

Cardin cried out in pain, and tried to shove Dove away from him—but Dove caught his arm, then twisted it over his head and pinned him in place.

 

"Leave Sky alone," he said, deadly quiet.

 

"What the _hell?!"_ Cardin demanded. He struggled and flailed at the boy in front of him.

 

"I have had enough of your _shit,_ Cardin," Dove continued, his voice growing louder with every word. "And I am _not_ letting you endanger the rest of us for the sake of your pathetic ego!"

 

"Screw you!" Cardin yelled, kicking Dove in the shin. The other boy ignored the attack entirely and brought his face even closer, until the two were almost nose to nose.

 

"Are you willing to bet your life that _she—"_ Dove jabbed a finger over his shoulder, pointing it straight at Blake, "is so much of a complete _saint_ that she's still going to save your dumb ass, if you get cornered by a Deathstalker?"

 

Blake's brow furrowed, and she opened her mouth—possibly to say that she would not, in fact, let him die—but Russel caught her eye and made a frantic shushing motion with both hands.

 

Pyrrha glanced helplessly at Jaune, who mouthed something back at her. It was too dark to see exactly what, but the finger he placed over his lips was clear enough.

 

"I don't _need_ her help!" Cardin shouted, face going redder by the minute.

 

"Yes, you do. You've got muscle, Cardin, but you're slow, stupid, and completely useless at fighting in a unit. If I hadn't been backing you up—if Rose and the Schnee hadn't been between you and those Grimm we fought? You'd be dead. And I'm _sick_ of your wounded pride getting in the way of our team."

 

"Get _off_ me!"

 

"Nikos wouldn't have to tell me to get off." Dove kept staring Cardin right in the eyes. "I'm sure she's been in a hold like this enough times to know how to break it."

 

"Shut _up!"_

 

_"Make me."_

 

"I'm your _leader!"_ Cardin spat. His eyes were bulging, and a vein stood out on his forehead.

 

"Some leader!" Dove retorted, driving his knee into Cardin's gut. The other boy grunted and squirmed in his teammate's grip. "Have you even _bothered_ to look around lately? Sky can't stand being in the same room with you, the sight of you makes me sick _,_ and Russel keeps getting caught in the middle of it. Your team is _broken,_ and you're too busy getting off on kicking around weaklings like Scarlatina and Arc to notice." Pyrrha bristled at that, but Jaune caught her eyes and shook his head.

 

Cardin jerked in place, and managed to free one arm from Dove's grip. He swung at the boy's face, but his fist was caught easily.

 

"If you touch my partner again? If you even _look_ at him funny? I'll hurt you. _Badly."_

Just like that, he dumped his leader unceremoniously to the ground. Cardin bounced off the floor with a cry of pain, and Dove stalked away.

 

"Come on," he muttered, grabbing Sky by the arm and leading him off. Pyrrha caught a glimpse of him, right as his flashlight jerked in his hands and lit his face for just a moment. His eyes were shining with unshed tears.

 

Cardin slumped against the wall of the cave, staring dumbly after his teammates. Russel walked up to him, gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder, and followed Dove back to their campsite.

 

"Holy _crap,"_ Yang murmured, staring after Dove.

 

"Are you... alright?" Pyrrha asked Blake, glancing between her and Cardin.

 

"Fine," came the clipped reply.

 

"It'll be okay," Yang said. "Cardin doesn't have a problem with her anymore, _does he?"_

 

Cardin didn't respond.

 

"Let's go," Blake suggested. "We should see how the other's are doing."

 

Pyrrha followed her gratefully, sparing one last look at Cardin. He was still curled up on the floor, clutching his stomach. Yang bent down so that she was almost level with him and whispered, "You're lucky Dove got to you first."

 

Then she stood, and walked off after her partner. Pyrrha followed, ignoring Cardin entirely. As she passed Jaune, she gave him a curious look. "Aren't you coming?"

 

"Go on, I'll catch up in a minute," he replied, and moved past her to crouch beside Cardin. Pyrrha glanced at them warily, but followed Blake and Yang back to their campsite. It wasn't far, only about a dozen yards from where the Deathstalker had died.

 

The rest of team CRDL were standing in the middle of the cave, and Pyrrha could see Sky glancing between Blake and Weiss with a panicked look on his face. Blake raised an eyebrow at him, then sighed. "Cardinal knows," she said, rubbing gingerly at her temple.

 

"Huh?" Ruby stared at her. "You mean... about the..."

 

"That I'm a faunus, yes."

 

"Are you alright?" Weiss asked, glaring suspiciously at the three members of CRDL.

 

"You _knew?"_ Sky said, dumbstruck.

 

"Of course," Weiss replied. "It's hard to keep a secret like that, sharing a room with three other people."

 

"And you're okay with that?" Russel asked incredulously. Pyrrha felt the tension in the air climb another notch.

 

"I—yes," Weiss said, becoming strangely fascinated with something on her left shoe. "It may have been... more difficult than it should have, at first, but she _is_ my friend and teammate."

 

Russel snorted. "You don't sound so sure."

 

Her eyes narrowed. "Maybe I should use small words then? Anyway, she's a far better person than _you,_ by any measurement I can think of."

 

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

 

"Enough," Blake interrupted, though Pyrrha thought she might've looked slightly pleased. "Now isn't the time for this."

 

Weiss nodded, her expression softening almost immediately. "And you're okay?"

 

"I'm _fine."_

 

"What happened, anyway?"

 

"Dove beat up Cardin!" Yang crowed. "It was _awesome!"_

 

Ruby turned and gaped at the boy in question. "What? Why?"

 

Dove twitched. "We had... personal issues to resolve."

 

"What kind of personal issues could possibly lead to assaulting a teammate?" Weiss demanded.

 

"None of your business," he said curtly.

  
"I would have, if he'd been on my team," Yang offered.

 

"Me too!" Nora exclaimed, jumping into the conversation with all her usual subtlety. "I wanted to break his legs!"

 

Sky was staring at her in naked fear, but Ren put a hand on her elbow and said, "I think he's had enough for one day, Nora."

 

"After what he said, I'm not so sure," Yang muttered darkly.

 

Blake sighed. "Did you kill all the Grimm in the other tunnel?" she asked, in a transparent attempt to change the subject.

 

"Yep!" Ruby said, beaming. "We just had a few of those six-legged ones. I don't remember Professor Port ever mentioning them before."

 

"He didn't," Weiss confirmed. "I've never heard of them either."

 

"Just because you've never heard of them, doesn't mean they don't exist," Russel snarled, folding his arms across his chest.

 

"What is your problem?!"

 

"There isn't that much of a difference between a new species and an old one that none of us have heard of," Sky interjected, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. "Either way, we don't know their weak spots, or what might be dangerous about them."

 

"Not much, as far as I could tell," Ruby replied. "They crawled on the ceiling, which was weird, but all I had to do was hit them once with Crescent Rose and they died."

 

"Hey, guys!"

  
Pyrrha turned, giving Jaune a soft smile as he returned to the rest of the group. Cardin was slinking along behind him, glaring at his own shoelaces. Her partner grinned back, swiping his hand through the back of his hair the way he usually did when he was nervous.

 

"Did you talk to him?" she whispered, as soon as he was next to her.

 

"Yeah. Just a little advice someone once gave me." Pyrrha waited a moment, but he didn't elaborate.

 

"So!" Ruby chirped. "We should check the dead Grimm, to see which way the smoke is headed."

 

"That way," Ren said almost instantly, pointing at the tunnel he'd been fighting in. Judging by the thin arrow that had been scratched out on the floor, he'd already marked it.

 

"Awesome," Jaune sighed. Pyrrha gave him her best reassuring smile.

 

"Onward!" Ruby cheered, and trotted off towards the left fork of the tunnel.

 

Pyrrha followed, chuckling softly at her friend's enthusiasm. She was feeling surprisingly content considering the tense confrontation she'd just witnessed. It helped that Jaune was once again walking beside her, with Ren and Nora right in front of them. She was still getting used to the fact that she was sometimes literally _surrounded_ by friends, considering how few and far between meaningful relationships had been in the past.

 

So, as they walked deeper into the bowels of the earth, following a trail made from the decaying corpses of mankind's fiercest foes, Pyrrha found herself against all odds barely containing her excitement. She couldn't hide her smile, despite the odd looks Russel kept shooting her.

 

"I have a question," he said, after a few minutes. Pyrrha looked back at him, frowning.

 

"Where was the box on the Beacon application that asked you to confirm that you were _completely insane?_ Because I'm pretty sure I checked it by accident."

 

"Top left of page two, question number twelve," Nora answered helpfully.

 

"Wait, what?!" Jaune blurted. His panicked expression was rather cute.

 

"She's just kidding," Ren said, before adding under his breath, "I think."

 

"Why do you ask?" Dove wondered.

 

"Because ten out of the twelve of us voted to go down here _voluntarily?"_

 

"I think it's kind of pretty," Ruby said dreamily.

 

"I rest my case."

 

"Where's your sense of adventure?" Yang teased. "We're in uncharted territory! Wonders never before seen by man!"

 

"It's a _tunnel,"_ Russel insisted. "This part looks pretty much the same as the entrance did."

 

"I just want to know what's happening to the Grimm essence," Weiss said, from her position at the front with Ruby. "The appearance of the cave is—oh. _Oh."_

 

"What's wrong?" Jaune asked anxiously. The two at the front had stopped moving, and Yang and Blake soon followed suit.

 

"It's _huge!"_ Ruby sounded awestruck. Pyrrha craned her neck to try and see what they were talking about, but the cave had taken a sharp turn and she couldn't tell what was going on. She and Jaune were far from alone in rushing to catch up. They turned the corner at a run, expecting to see some kind of massive Grimm.

 

"Incredible," she found herself saying.

 

Before them, the relatively narrow passageway opened up into a gigantic cavern, large enough that it swallowed up the wan lights given off by their flashlights. But the cave was not dark—along the walls, the floors, even the roof far above them, grew millions upon millions of many-colored crystals. They protruded from every surface, branching off in fractal patterns and sometimes merging with one another. The beams of the group's flashlights were caught and magnified within them until they shone like stars. Heavy shadows stretched between each point of light, shrouding the walls of the cavern almost entirely.

 

If Pyrrha let her eyes unfocus, she could almost imagine that there was no end to the cavern, that it stretched on forever in every direction. It felt a lot like her most distant memories of the highlands of Mistral, where there were flat, wide-open pastures she could stand in and stare at the constellations above, and the sky seemed vast beyond imagining.

 

 

 

 

"It's Dust," Weiss whispered, so softly Pyrrha barely heard her.

 

"What, all of it?" Ruby asked. Her cloak swirled around her heels as she turned to stare at the nearest crystal. It was taller than she was by a solid margin.

 

"All of it," Blake replied. "And it's pure enough that even one of those crystals could probably obliterate us."

 

"They're flawless," Weiss breathed, almost reverently. "I've never seen anything like it." She reached a hand out as if to touch one, then froze. Her arm dropped limply back to her side.

 

"Nobody go near them," Russel warned. "I've blown myself up enough times to know how easy it is to set this stuff off."

 

"And Ruby?"

 

"Yes, Weiss?"

 

"Don't you _dare_ sneeze."

 

Pyrrha blinked in confusion, but let the matter drop. She didn't want to speak—it felt almost sacrilegious, breaking the silence in a place like this.

 

"Let's keep moving," Blake suggested. "We don't want to get caught fighting in here."

 

It was difficult to walk quickly, when all Pyrrha really wanted to do was stop and stare some more. Even knowing that the whole cave was a dropped flashlight away from an explosion, they retained the strange sort of allure they'd had when she first laid eyes on them.

 

Eventually, they came close to the center of the cavern. The crystals were sparser here, revealing a large, roughly circular patch of rock beneath them—like an island of darkness in a starry sea.

 

"I don't think this is natural," Weiss said, pausing to inspect the ground with her flashlight.

 

"Huh?" Ruby leaned over her shoulder, squinting at the patch of stone she was looking at.

 

"I mean, this spot here. There are gouge marks in the ground, like it was mined."

 

"Old tools, by the look of it," Sky added. "Maybe a pickaxe? Nothing mechanical, it's too irregular."

 

"Nerd," Yang teased. Sky went pink.

 

"I never knew Dust mines were this beautiful," Pyrrha murmured, craning her neck to get another look at the ceiling.

 

"They aren't," Blake replied. "I've seen a few, and the Dust they find is always mixed in veins of rock, or grouped into much smaller crystals than this."

 

"I wonder how many places like this there are in the world," Weiss said, again in that odd, softened voice. "Lying forgotten under the surface."

 

She paused, resting a hand on the hilt of her rapier. "My father would kill for a deposit like this."

 

"Are you going to tell him?" Blake asked.

 

"I don't know. I... I don't like the idea of this place being stripped down like that. Left empty."

 

"Me neither," Ruby agreed.

 

"It'll have to be, eventually," said Blake. "Pretty or not, eventually people are going to need it to fight the Grimm."

  
"Well, there's a happy thought." Yang strode past the spot Weiss had been inspecting, doing a little spin to take in the scenery. "But we should probably keep going, if we don't want to get blown up."

 

"Right," Weiss said, seeming to snap out of whatever trance she'd been in.

 

Pyrrha glanced to her left, where Jaune was walking slowly, his head twisting and turning as he tried to look everywhere at once. The gentle glow of the Dust had dyed his face a pale orange, like a sunset. It brought out his eyes.

 

Struck with a sudden urge—because she was quite sure that she had never seen or heard of a place this romantic in her life—Pyrrha bumped into him, shooting him a playful smile as he turned to look at her.

 

"Hey," he said, grinning back. The light shifted to a deep blue, and the exact contours of his face were lost in shadow.

 

"This is nice." Pyrrha was surprised to realize just how much she meant it—considering she'd been in a life-or-death fight with a Deathstalker less than an hour ago, her day had gone remarkably well.

 

"It... kind of is." He laughed, and Pyrrha could hear a few faint echoes bouncing around the cavern, high above them. "I mean, this is definitely going in my top five scenic spots to risk my life in." She let out a small chuckle of her own.

 

 _Of all the places to tell him,_ Pyrrha thought, _This would be quite a memorable one._ The presence of the others stopped her, though. Just the thought of confessing to him made her feel anxious enough without having an audience.

 

Before she could think of a plausible reason to dawdle behind the others, they had already reached the other side. Their path had been somewhat meandering, as the massive crystals often blocked their way, but eventually the roundabout route had to come to an end. That was, it _would_ have if there had been anything on the other side.

 

"Is... this it?" Jaune asked, turning to look at her.

 

"It's a rather large cave," she replied. "We should probably look around a little more before we—"

 

"Found it!" Nora shouted. Pyrrha winced as she heard a few distant echoes bouncing back from the other side of the cave.

 

"Keep your voice down," Weiss snapped. "You'll collapse the whole place on top of us!"

 

"Sorry! But there's another exit over there." Nora pointed like she did almost everything else—with her entire body. One finger gestured dramatically to her left, while the opposite foot lifted up until it was parallel to the ground. Her back arched as she posed dramatically.

 

"Right, let's go," Jaune said, with no visible reaction to her theatrics. They'd been living with her for months now, after all.

 

Ducking beneath a protruding crag of rock, they soon found the tunnel Nora had been referring to, tucked in between two hulking crystals. It was webbed through with veins of what Pyrrha assumed was probably more Dust, glowing faintly and washing the shadows with strange colors. There were also odd holes burrowing deep into the stone, all nearly circular. She made a mental note to keep watch on those.

 

Despite all odds, Pyrrha found herself relaxing as they left the cavern—beautiful it may have been, but the threat of a possible explosion tended to put her on edge. The others expressed similar feelings, though many of them seemed to share the same reluctance she had at losing sight of those oddly mesmerizing crystals.

 

They walked for a while, after Ren had scratched another arrow into the floor to mark their passage. It was nice to be able to fall so easily into the rhythm of conversation, to chip in here or there with a comment or a bit of encouragement. Sometimes she just listened, glancing occasionally at Jaune out of the corner of her eye. His eyes seemed to light up when he talked, especially when it was something he was passionate about. Just the sight of it made her almost dizzy with pride.

It wasn't until the tunnel started to angle sharply downwards that Pyrrha was broken out of her thoughts. Her footing became much less solid, mostly because the cave floor was damp, and it was easy to imagine slipping up and sliding all the way down.

 

Once she was used to it, though, the incline wasn't unmanageable so much as it was mildly irritating. It forced her to pay much more careful attention to where she stepped, and the conversation between her friends grew muted. The strange holes in the walls were more frequent now, occasionally grouping together in sets of three or four. Pyrrha wasn't the only one who had noticed, either—Blake and Ren in particular were both paying more attention to them than the passage ahead. The sight of them made her skin crawl, though she wasn't quite sure why.

 

Before long, Blake's bow started to twitch.

 

"There's something moving in the walls." She turned to stare into the nearest opening.

 

"Wait, _what?"_ blurted Sky, following her movements with his shaking flashlight.

 

"Which way?" Ruby asked, whirling around frantically.

  
"It's echoing too much to—that side!" Blake broke off midsentence to point to her right, at a veritable hive of long, foot-wide tunnels.

 

It wasn't long before Pyrrha could hear it too, a strange skittering noise that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. She had no idea how many creatures of Grimm were approaching—the echoes Blake had mentioned made it impossible to tell.

 

Then, with a low _hiss_ that seemed to vibrate deep in her bones, something burst from a nearby hole. It turned toward them, its pinched face adorned by a thick white mask. Two deep-set eyes glowed through cracks and crevices in its armor, and a pair of serrated pincers snapped at the sides of its head. As it crawled forward, legs began to emerge from the opening, more legs than _anything_ ought to have, long and thin and undulating hypnotically.

 

As soon as the Grimm had fully emerged it swung its head around to face them. With a long, chilling screech, it dove for the shadows at the sides of the cave. Sky whirled in place, swinging his flashlight frantically in an attempt to locate the creature. The light washed over it, revealing two long barbs trailing behind it like a tail.

 

Ducking behind her shield, Pyrrha prepared for an attack—only to stagger in surprise as it dodged around her. She lunged behind herself with Miló and found that it hadn't even tried to strike at her back. Instead, it skittered straight past her.

 

Jaune was the next to meet its charge, but could only yelp in shock as it darted between his legs, tripping him as his sword glanced harmlessly off its armored back.

 

Pyrrha threw her javelin, hitting the Grimm right on the back of its bone-plated head. Instead of turning around it ignored her entirely, choosing instead to engage Ren and Nora.

  
There was a flash of light and a loud bang as Ruby shot her rifle. Nora leapt forward, hammer swinging—and the creature sped up, moving faster than Pyrrha would have believed, weaving between her and Ren and under a clumsy swipe of Cardin's mace.

 

Sky, the next in line, cried out in terror and dropped his flashlight, gripping his axe in one hand. He raised it in front of him, still screaming.

 

The Grimm lunged—not for Sky, but for the flashlight. It shattered in the creature's mandibles, and only then did the monster turn its attention to the rest of them. It's head swiveled around, turning inexorably to focus on Weiss—and the flashlight in her right hand.

 

Dodging around Yang and Ruby, the monster struck out at the flashlight. Weiss deflected the assault with a glyph, brandishing her rapier in front of her and pulling her right hand out of reach of the Grimm. Ruby rushed to assist her, scythe slamming into the plating of its lower back to little effect.

 

"Weiss!" Jaune shouted. Pyrrha risked a glance, and realized that her partner was holding his hand up high, as though poised to catch a football. "Toss it here!"

 

Once she chucked the flashlight at him, Weiss was finally able to focus on fighting the monster—only for it to turn tail and charge back toward Jaune, glaring at the light in his hand with singleminded hatred.

 

"Catch!" he cried out, locking eyes with Ren. Again, the light was lobbed over all their heads, and the enraged Grimm turned to try and destroy it.

 

"Try flipping it over!" Ruby suggested. "Its armor might be weaker on the bottom!"

 

Ren tossed the flashlight to Sky, and sprinted toward the Grimm. Nora came right behind him, smashing into the creature's side full force. It squealed, snapping angrily at her before making another dive for the light. Ren took the opportunity to slash at one of the long barbs on its back.

 

Then, Sky managed to point the flashlight's beam straight at its beady red eyes. The Grimm _howled,_ loud enough that Pyrrha took a few rapid steps back and screwed up her eyes in pain. Through blurry vision, she could see Blake staggering, hands pressed over the bow on top of her head, and winced in sympathy.

 

Finally, the scream stopped. Through the ringing in her ears, Pyrrha could just hear Ruby shouting, "Light it up!" And there was _fire._

 

Weiss and Russel both stood poised, their weapons brandished in front of them. Two twin streams of flame met right where the Grimm lay, writhing in agony and screeching with rage. In its panicked flailing, it flipped itself over and began thrashing around on its back. Seeing this, Nora gave a merry salute and springboarded off of Ren's outstretched palms, flipped in midair, and slammed her hammer down on the monster's stomach.

 

A crunch, and the Grimm went still. Black smoke began to rise off its corpse and drift further down the tunnel.

 

"Wow," Yang breathed, prodding the dead monster with her foot. "That thing was _dumb."_

 

Pyrrha smiled. "A weakness you exploited wonderfully, Jaune."

 

Her partner scratched the back of his head, grinning. "Aw, stop it!"

 

"Can you imagine what would happen if it _had_ gotten the flashlight?" Sky whimpered, voice shaky.

 

Jaune blanched.

 

"That was... surprisingly good thinking, Jaune," Weiss said. Pyrrha tried not to be angry at the way he blushed and stammered.

 

"N-no big deal," he blurted. "It's all in a day's work!"

 

Yang laughed. "You played monkey in the middle with a Grimm, Jaune. That's definitely going above and beyond."

 

Pyrrha beamed at him. "It was an excellent strategy. You should be proud."

 

Russel snorted. "He didn't kill it," he said dismissively.

 

Ruby scowled—despite how much she agreed with the sentiment, Pyrrha couldn't help but think that it was rather cute.

 

"We wouldn't have had a chance without the light," she insisted.

 

"Yeah!" Nora cheered. "Jaune saved our butts!" Ren nodded firmly, adding his own silent agreement.

 

"It was _one_ idea," Cardin jeered. "You're acting like that's impressive." Jaune seemed to deflate, shuffling in place and staring at the ground.

 

"One idea that proved to be invaluable," snapped Pyrrha. She found herself gripping her javelin rather hard, barely resisting the urge to throw it at the petty excuse for a huntsman in front of her.

 

"Come _on,"_ Russel seethed. "Are you _blind?_ He's an idiot!"

 

"Russ, stop it!" pleaded Sky, grabbing his teammate by the shoulder. "It doesn't matter."

 

"Yeah, it kind of does," Yang said, crossing her arms in front of her and glaring at team CRDL. "I didn't see _you_ helping with strategy."

 

"I set it on _fire!"_ Russel shot back. His face was beginning to redden in anger.

 

Weiss snorted. "You helped, and that's putting it _generously."_

 

Russel went rigid, and for a second Pyrrha thought he might attack her. Instead, he went from red to purple and shouted, "Why are you defending him?!"

 

"He's our friend!" Nora chirped, giving Jaune a friendly punch on the shoulder—and nearly knocking him over, but he was used to that by now.

 

Then, Russel's face darkened. A sudden feeling of dread dropped into the pit of her stomach.

 

"He's a _fraud!"_ he roared, his expression contorting into something almost inhuman. "He didn't do anything to deserve being here!"

 

Breathing hard, Russel turned to stare at Jaune, the way someone might look at something disgusting stuck to their shoe. And then, he bared his teeth in a cruel smile, obviously relishing his next words.

 

"He cheated his way into Beacon."


	3. Look Up

 

_"He cheated his way into Beacon!"_

 

Russel's declaration rang in the close confines of the cave, as silence fell over the whole group. Blake blinked, once. That... well, it explained a lot.

 

She tried to imagine Jaune going through one of the hunter prep schools or passing the same test she had, and still bumbling around like he did in combat. As much as he _did_ have some promising leadership qualities... she was actually a little disappointed in herself for not realizing sooner that there was no _way_ he'd gotten into Beacon conventionally.

 

Glancing around, though, she saw Ruby staring open-mouthed at Jaune. The look on her face didn't bode well—though it was nothing like the thunderous expression Weiss was wearing. Apparently her complete lack of surprise was something of an outlier.

 

"Is... is that true?" Ruby asked quietly. Her voice seemed to wake the others—even the rest of team CRDL had to be shaken out of their shock. None of them looked surprised by the revelation itself, though—Blake suspected Russel had told them already.

 

Jaune was staring at the ground. "I-I..." he stammered, looking everywhere but at his classmates.

 

Pyrrha jumped to defend him. "It doesn't change anything," she asserted. "He's worked hard to get where he is, and he—"

 

"No," said Weiss, flatly. "Let him speak for himself."

 

Blake flinched, her ears flattening in sympathy—she couldn't help but remember those agonizing instants that had followed her own accidental confession last semester.

 

"Yeah," Jaune admitted, his voice cracking. "It's true."

 

"Oh," said Ruby.

"You can turn me in, if you want," he went on.

 

"Jaune, you don't have to—" Pyrrha started, but he shook his head.

 

"No," he said, his voice gaining some confidence. "It's up to them. After the mission... you can tell the headmaster, and I won't try to stop you."

 

"I'm not gonna do that, Jaune," Ruby decided. He stared at her, as though he couldn't quite believe his ears.

 

"You're still my friend, doofus," she reminded him, smiling weakly.

 

"Yeah!" Nora shouted, pointing her hammer dramatically at the cave ceiling. "You're our glorious leader, you can't get expelled!"

 

"You _have_ improved drastically over the course of the year," Ren agreed.

 

The look on Jaune's face—something between dumbstruck joy and abject terror—was achingly familiar. Blake had to smile.

 

"I won't turn you in either," she assured him. Yang cheered.

 

It took a moment, to realize who hadn't yet spoken. Weiss was still staring at Jaune, her expression unreadable.

 

"Weiss?" he said hesitantly, shifting from foot to foot. Blake winced. She remembered that look all too well.

 

For a moment, it seemed like she wasn't going to say anything at all. Then, taking a deep breath, she hissed, "How stupid _are_ you?"

 

Jaune tried to stammer something, and Pyrrha looked downright _murderous,_ but Weiss didn't seem to care.

  
"Do you know how many times we've all nearly _died_ since we got here?!" she demanded, waving a hand at the cave as if to offer it up as an example. "And that is with _years_ of training and effort. Did you seriously think you could just walk in here and become a huntsman without doing _anything?"_

 

"No!" Jaune blurted. "I mean, I thought... I _was_ training, but I never got into any of the prep schools, and then I kept falling behind. I wanted to be a hero, not some... some damsel in distress!" His shoulders slumped, and he hung his head. "I just wasn't good enough."

 

_"Idiot."_ Weiss took another step forward, and seemed to be doing her best to vaporize him with her eyes.

  
Blake grinned. She knew _that_ look, too.

 

"Those tests are there for a reason," Weiss snapped, in almost the exact same tone of voice she sometimes used on her partner. "This isn't like most schools where failure means washing out and going home. You could have gotten yourself killed!"

 

Hope dawned on Ruby's face, but Jaune didn't seem to notice.

 

"I'm sorry!" he wailed.

 

"Good," Weiss huffed. "I'll have you know, I expect you to be able to pass the entrance exam with flying colors by the end of the year."

 

Jaune blinked dumbly. "You mean..." he said, glancing between Weiss' disapproving frown and Ruby's grin. "You aren't going to report me?"

 

Weiss sighed. "No."

 

"Thank y—"

 

"On _one_ condition." Jaune's mouth shut with a _plop,_ and his blue eyes went wide.

 

Folding her arms, Weiss _glared_ at him. "No flirting. No flowers. And _no singing."_

 

Jaune blinked. "Uh, okay?"

 

"Excellent."

 

Blake couldn't help but smile—the look of rapturous joy on Jaune's face was incredibly infectious.

 

Naturally, someone had to ruin it.

 

_"Seriously?!"_ Russel shouted, his eyes flickering between the eight of them before settling on Jaune. "What is _wrong_ with you people?"

 

"What's wrong with _you?"_ Weiss snapped back. "How stupid do you have to be to bring up something like this in the middle of enemy territory?"

 

Blake smirked. _Good Weiss._

 

Russel flushed, and took a threatening step forward. Weiss didn't blink—team CRDL's dueling record wasn't exactly intimidating.

 

"He didn't earn this!" he shouted, waving his arms above his head. "And you all just _accept_ that!? He's a danger to himself, and he's going to drag _you_ down with him!"

 

"He's our leader," Pyrrha said, putting a hand on Jaune's shoulder. "And he's more than proven himself."

 

Russel let out a wordless scream of frustration, as Dove stepped up beside him.  
  
"Let it go," his teammate advised. "It isn't important right now."

 

"It _is!"_ Russel shouted back. "Some of us didn't have this _handed_ to them! Some of us had to claw and _fight_ to be here, and he gets to just walk in?!"

 

"Russ—" Sky began, but was cut off.

 

"And _you!"_ Russel seethed, jabbing a finger at Weiss. She raised an eyebrow. "You think you're better than me?"

 

"Yes," Weiss replied, as if it were obvious. It was... probably the wrong thing to say.

 

_"Bitch,"_ Russel spat. Blake watched helplessly as the situation sailed straight past the point of no return and into thermonuclear territory.

 

_"Excuse_ you?!"

 

"Yipe," Ruby squeaked, backing up a step. As much as she might've wanted to help her friend, _next to Weiss_ probably wasn't a safe place to be right then.

 

"You heard me," the dead man shot back, stubbornly refusing to try and save himself.

 

"Uh, guys?" Yang said hesitantly. "Maybe we should—"

 

"Shut up!" Russel shouted. "At least I _worked_ to get in here!"

 

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?!" Weiss hissed, her hands balling themselves into fists. Blake grabbed Yang by the collar and pulled her back—there was nothing they could do for him now.

"It must be nice, being able to pull a few strings and waltz right into Beacon." He gave a dark chuckle. "Only the best for Daddy's little princess."

 

Blake was expecting her to snap at him, to unleash a verbal tirade that left him cowering. But, to her horror, Weiss flinched back as if slapped. Her hand flew up for an instant, as if to touch her cheek, and then fell limply to her side. Her face _twisted,_ and before anyone could so much as blink Myrtenaster was in her hand.

 

"Weiss!" Ruby cried out, grabbing her arm. Blake could only gape at her friend as she snarled wordlessly, yanked herself free of Ruby's grip, and stalked off down the tunnel.

 

There was a moment of shocked silence. Then, Russel breathed, "Her _eye._ " Blake remembered the aborted motion, but she hadn't made the connection—maybe because Weiss had been facing away from her.

 

Cardin sniggered. "Ow, Daddy!" he squeaked in a high falsetto, and broke down into laughter.

_...And every day, my father would come home_ furious.

  
Something slimy curled around Blake's heart and _squeezed._

 

"What the _hell,_ Cardin?!" Dove was shouting, staring at his leader in disgust. Blake ignored him, turning to find Yang looking back at her. Their eyes met briefly, before they both turned to Ruby.

 

A handful of rose petals drifted silently to the ground.

 

"Come on!" Yang said, grabbing Blake by the arm. She nodded, sprinting after their leader. Soon, the tunnel darkened and Blake had to lead her partner, straining her eyes to catch the faint glimmer of distant flashlights.

 

As they disappeared from earshot, she could hear familiar voices.

 

_"...such a jerk!"_

_"...gonna knock you into orbit!"_

_"What is_ wrong _with you?!"_

"... _despicable excuse for a Huntsman!"_

 

Blake decided in that moment that, if any of them ever asked her to, she would happily follow team JNPR into hell itself—no questions asked.

 

A few dozen yards down the tunnel, it split in two. The leftmost passage was emitting a faint light, so Blake decided to head that way. Her guess turned out to be correct, and by the time she and Yang found Weiss, Ruby was already there. She was fidgeting in place, looking desperate to say _something_ but unsure of what it should be. Yang made a beeline for her sister's side, and laid a supportive hand on her shoulder.

 

Weiss, it seemed, had stormed off down the corridor and found a side passage to hide in. Her sword was leaning on the wall beside her, the Dust in its blade glowing a dull red that cast burnt-looking shadows across the walls.

 

Ruby fidgeted in place a moment, before turning to throw a desperate, pleading look at her sister.

 

"Um," Yang said, very unhelpfully.

 

As much as she wanted to be annoyed with them, Blake had to admit that she couldn't figure out what to say, either. She could see Weiss' patience rapidly evaporating.

 

"We wanted to ask..." Ruby managed, before devolving into unintelligible mumbling.

 

_"What?"_ Weiss snapped, folding her arms and glaring at them.

 

Her partner's back went ramrod straight as she blurted, "Your scar! We, um, wanted to know what happened."

 

If there _had_ been a right way to ask, that hadn't been it. Weiss flushed scarlet and hissed, "None of your business!"

 

Ruby recoiled as if stung, murmuring a nearly inaudibly apology. The look on her face was enough to make Blake feel guilty just for being there, so it was no surprise when Weiss heaved a sigh and spoke again.

  
"It was a training accident, if you must know." She broke eye contact before she got halfway through the sentence, leveling a half-hearted glare at the floor. Blake felt her heart sink.

 

"You don't have to protect him," she said, doing her best to sound sympathetic. For a moment, honest bewilderment flickered across her teammate's face. Then it was gone, replaced by irritation.

 

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?" Weiss demanded.

 

"Weiss... you can talk to us. We promised, remember?"

 

"My father doesn't _beat me,_ if that's what you're implying," Weiss snarled. A muscle in her jaw jumped. She turned away, crossing her arms.

 

"Sorry to disappoint you," she huffed over her shoulder.

 

Blake gritted her teeth, forcing down the rush of indignant fury. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone," she said, keeping her tone as even as she could. "Especially not a friend."

 

Weiss winced. "I know." It wasn't quite an apology, but the sentiment was there.

 

"It's okay."

 

"Is that what you think he's like?" Weiss blurted, turning to glance between the three of them.

 

"Um?" Ruby said, squirming in place. "Well, you don't really talk about him much..."

 

Weiss raised an eyebrow. "So naturally he _must_ be a monster."

 

Blake had thought that long before she'd met Weiss, but bringing it up would only reopen an old argument.

  
"I've seen him on the news," she said instead. "He always seemed—" _Slimy. Soulless._ "Cold."

 

"He is," Weiss replied, without hesitation, "but wouldn't try to hurt me, not like that. Okay?"

 

_No. Not okay._ There were far too many words in that sentence, words like, 'try to,' and, 'like that.' But Yang and Ruby each mustered a smile, and Blake forced herself to do the same.

 

"You know..." Yang said, "you're still allowed to complain about him, if you want. My dad does annoying stuff all the time, and I still love him." Weiss frowned.

 

"Like sending you dogs in the mail?" she asked, sounding skeptical.

 

"Eh," Yang replied flippantly. "That's about a six out of ten, for him."

 

"Then what—" Weiss clapped a hand over her own mouth. "Forget I asked," she continued, voice now muffled. "I don't want to know." Ruby giggled, though there was a nervous undercurrent to it.

 

Silence reigned for a few moments. It wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but the atmosphere still had a certain tense feeling to it. Not that it lasted long—Ruby started vibrating in place, and soon spoke up again.

 

"Are... are you mad?" she asked timidly. Blake could pinpoint the exact instant that Weiss gave up on trying to be exasperated.

  
"No. I know you—hey!"

 

The instant the word 'no' left her mouth, Ruby leapt forward and threw her arms around her partner's shoulders. Blake started counting.

 

On four, Weiss began struggling. "Will you get _off?"_

 

Ruby leapt back, bouncing on her heels and beaming. As she should—it was a new record.

 

Weiss, on the other hand, was looking guiltily at the ground. After a moment she murmured, "My scar. It... wasn't exactly a training accident."

 

Blake looked up sharply, feeling the pit in her stomach returning full force.

 

"I got it during a test, to see if I could go to Beacon instead of Atlas." Seeing the looks of horror on their faces, she held up a hand.

 

_"But,"_ she continued, "It was _my_ decision to keep going when my aura ran low. No one else's." Her eyes took on a steely quality, one Blake usually only saw in the middle of life-or-death fights.

They stood in silence for a moment, silently absorbing Weiss' declaration. Ruby started to fidget.

 

"So, um..." she hedged, reaching behind her back to put a hand on her scythe. "Do you want to head back?"

 

Weiss frowned, then nodded. "I... apologize for my behavior, earlier," she said, a bit reluctantly.

 

Yang responded with an ever-elegant, "Huh?"

 

"With Russel." Her lip curled, mirroring the kind of expression she might wear if she were looking at a dead rat. "We shouldn't be fighting each other right now."

 

"No!" Ruby blurted, then paused. "I mean, that wasn't your fault. He was being a big..." she stopped, apparently searching for a suitably scathing word. "...Poophead."

 

Weiss let out a startled laugh before she managed to muffle it with her hand. "Right," she said, clearing her throat in an attempt to regain some level of dignity. "We should go."

 

And they went, with Weiss holding up her rapier to light their way. The tunnel was, if anything, even eerier in the dim red glow of the Dust, but before long they could spot their classmates' flashlights.

Blake strode up to them, her anger suddenly returning to her all at once. She still wanted to flay Cardin to within an inch of his life for that joke, even if it wasn't true. But, when she approached, she realized that team JNPR had probably already covered that.

 

Cardin was sulking on the floor, and she noticed that the rest of his team had moved to the opposite side of the tunnel as if to distance themselves as much as possible. Everyone looked up when Weiss walked in. They seemed distinctly uncomfortable.

 

Surprisingly enough, it was Russel who spoke first. He stood from where he'd been sitting and stared Weiss right in the eye.

 

"I'm sorry for what I said," he told her. "I didn't know."

 

"You still don't," she snapped. "It was a _training accident."_

 

He blinked, startled, though Blake couldn't really tell if he believed her or not.

 

"You don't know me," Weiss continued. "And frankly, I don't _want_ to know you. So stop making assumptions, or at least have the decency to keep them to yourself." With that, she strode off, back the way they'd come.

 

When no one moved to follow her, she tossed a glare over her shoulder and prompted, "Well?"

 

Ruby was the first to unfreeze, jogging along after her partner and fumbling around with her flashlight. Well, Weiss' flashlight—her own was still in her pack somewhere, or maybe back at their room. Blake and Yang fell into step behind them, and soon the rest of their class followed. Cardin walked a long way behind the group, arms folded across his chest.

 

Of course, they didn't get that far—just to the fork in the tunnel where Weiss had stopped. Jaune craned his neck to peer down each passage and said, "I guess we wait."

 

"Awesome," Sky snarked under his breath. Blake turned to glare at him, and he shrank back. She sighed. Maybe it wasn't totally fair to blame him for what his teammates had just done, but she hadn't forgotten how he'd helped torment Velvet, either.

 

As it turned out, they didn't have to wait that long. Another of the ant-like Grimm came shuffling out of the left-hand tunnel. It blinked blearily at them, as if it wasn't quite sure what they were doing there, before Ruby planted her scythe in its skull. Its carapace began to flake off, little motes of black mist forming and floating off in the direction it had come from.

 

"Well," Ruby said, planting a hand on her hip. "I guess we go that way."

 

"Those things need a name," Jaune decided, as they plodded along yet another stone tunnel.

 

"Like what?" Pyrrha asked.

 

"Like... I don't know, Ant-Monsters?" He wilted slightly as everyone turned to stare at him. "But, you know, better than that."

 

Yang grinned. "How about _Ant_ agonists?" The others groaned. Blake, who had seen the play on words coming a mile away, just shook her head and sighed.

 

"Maybe Workers?" Ruby suggested. "You know, like worker ants."

 

"That works, I guess," Jaune agreed with a shrug. Yang twitched at his choice of words, and Blake shot her a quelling look.

 

They went on in silence for a while after that. The tunnel widened gradually around them, until all twelve could walk abreast. The extra space made her nervous—it meant that there were four directions for the Grimm to attack from, rather than two.

 

The feeling was only magnified when they stepped out into another massive cavern. This one was totally empty of Dust, though there were a few stone stalagmites jutting from the floor. Their group formed a rough circle, with Ruby and Ren in the middle holding flashlights. Soon enough, Yang fumbled in her own pack and brought out another. Blake took to watching their rear, where there was less light.

  
Not even a quarter of the way through the cavern, she started to hear a low metallic clanging coming from Sky, who was shaking in his armor. Blake might have found it pathetic, if she wasn't biting her own lip to try to keep her composure. Even Ren, normally so stoic, was flicking his light back and forth, sweeping the cavern with obvious nervousness.

 

The intense unease only mounted as they walked. With every step, it felt as though they were being watched with hostile eyes. It took far too long for Blake to remember it—a mission from a long time ago, before she'd gone to Beacon. She and Adam had been in the trees, waiting for a truck full of Dust to pass below them. When she'd asked why they had to jump down, rather than just waiting on the ground, he'd smiled his old smile—the playful one he'd lost in the years since.

 

"Humans never look up," he'd said.

 

Slowly, dread pooling in her gut, Blake craned her neck upward—and _screamed._

 

Not fifteen feet above her hovered a white mask that was _covered_ with eyes. They were arrayed haphazardly with no patterns to be seen, all blood red and bulging with hatred. Above it, a fat and distended body hung by eight impossibly long legs, flailing wildly as it descended toward her.

It took the others a moment to realize what she was looking at, and when they did they all scrambled to dodge the monsters. Monsters—because there were more of them, _dozens_ of them, and Blake had to throw herself sideways to avoid the one that had nearly landed on her _head_ without her noticing. She tucked into a roll and came up on her feet, flinging Gambol Shroud at the creature. It _hissed,_ a low and dissonant noise that sent chills running down her spine.

 

Gritting her teeth, she slipped off her heavy pack and let it drop to the ground. Now unencumbered, she leapt upward, leaving behind a clone that was skewered by the Spider's fangs. As it paused, apparently confused, she landed on its back and shoved her sword through its abdomen. It shrieked, spasmed once, and died.

 

Not even a second later, she heard someone yelp—probably Jaune, if she were to guess. Blake spared a glance at her friends, and gasped as she realized that there were only three flashlights, and none of them had decent night-vision.

 

Weiss was faring reasonably well on her own—her rapier glowed enough for her to track her opponents, though two of them were trying to flank her. Nora, too, was fine—Ren had positioned himself behind her and was doing his best to keep his flashlight pointed toward the Spiders. Ruby and Yang were giving similar assistance to Pyrrha and Jaune. It was spotty, because these Grimm, much like the Centipede they'd fought before, seemed to target light sources. Not as single-mindedly, but enough that they kept having to dodge attacks and plunge the others into darkness.

 

Team CRDL, meanwhile, was suffering badly. They were trying to clump toward the others and avoid being caught in the dark, but weren't having much luck. Sky was shaking so badly he looked like he was about to drop his halberd, and Russel was holding both his daggers in his mouth as he fumbled blindly in his bag for a light.

 

Blake grimaced, but reluctantly made her way to the struggling group and engaged a particularly large Grimm that had been bearing down on Dove without him noticing. The boy startled at the sound of Gambol Shroud clashing against the monster's pincers, then raised his own blade.

 

"Hurry _up,_ Russ!" roared Cardin. One of the Spiders knocked him over and pinned him with one leg, and his partner abruptly abandoned the bag he'd been searching in to slash at it with his daggers. They weren't glowing, not like Weiss' sword—did he not have any Dust in them?

 

Blake growled in frustration as she watched something dark and round slip free of his bag, bounce once, and disappear down a low slope into the depths of the cavern. _Idiot._

 

She focused on the monster in front of her, weaving around in front of its face and managing to cut it across three of its eyes. They closed over, but at least a dozen more continued to glare at her.

 

"This isn't working!" Yang called out. Blake glanced over, just in time to see her drop her flashlight. She jogged to where Nora and Ren were fending off three of the beasts and once and shouted, "Nora! Hit me!"

 

"What?!" Sky yelped, ducking a lunge from one of the Grimm. It was all anyone had the chance to say before Nora obeyed.

 

Her hammer smashed into Yang's crossed forearms, knocking her back a good ten feet before she slammed into one of the stalactites. Blake flinched, heart wrenching—and then, light _exploded_ into being.

 

Shrieks echoed all around them, inhuman and buzzing with eerie undertones that made her flesh crawl. Blake couldn't help but sympathize with the Grimm—the sudden flash left her squinting and cursing under her breath. The others, though, were finally able to see what they were doing. Flashlights were one thing, a human sized bonfire was quite another—it was as though the sun had descended into their cave, and the battle began to turn in their favor. Perhaps more importantly, Ruby and Ren had dropped their flashlights and were able to step into the fight themselves. Meanwhile, Yang threw herself at the Spiders with wild abandon, whooping and hollering as she smashed one of their skulls into an oily black pulp.

 

Blake herself wasn't really affected by the new light, but she did find that she had more breathing room and fewer opponents. There were only a handful of the monsters near her, and team CRDL had recovered enough that they were holding their own. In fact, she could swear there were less than a dozen of the creatures engaging them. Had her sudden fear made her inflate their numbers in her head?

 

A yelp from behind her drew her attention back to the other end of the impromptu circle they'd made, where Jaune was struggling against a Spider nearly twice his size. His sword was jammed into its fangs, and it was gnashing them in a frenzied rage. Foam gathered in its mouth as it struggled, until Pyrrha planted her spear through its side and shoved it off of him.

 

But that wasn't really what worried Blake—what worried her was the sudden realization that no, she _hadn't_ miscounted when she first saw the horde of Grimm—they were just _all_ on that side. Her gaze flickered over her classmates, until she focused on Yang.

 

Her partner was, rather predictably, in the thick of the action. The only difference was that now, she was _literally_ in the middle of a maelstrom of pincers and legs and hairy black bodies, with some Grimm even crawling over one another to get to her. Team JNPR, who had been closest when she first burst into flame, were trying to do damage control as best they could, but they were having trouble managing the sheer weight of the monsters. Ruby and Weiss had noticed too, but there were too many Spiders near them for them to disengage.

 

Cursing herself for not realizing sooner, Blake rushed to her partner's side. She swore again when she realized that the Grimm were blocking the light with their bodies, making it that much more difficult for the others to defend themselves. It was a miracle they hadn't been overwhelmed yet—and a large part of that was probably that the Grimm closest to Yang had been blinded. They thrashed about indiscriminately, sometimes hurting each other with their attacks.

 

Gambol Shroud flew into the press of bodies, and Blake sent it spinning directly into one of the Spider's eyes. A shot of the pistol drove the blade into its brain, killing it on the spot. Another three surged forward to take its place. Grimacing, she inserted herself into the front line, pulling Yang back so that only her front was exposed to the melee—and so that the flames in her hair could properly light the battlefield.

 

The next few seconds were mostly a blur. Nearly a dozen Grimm died that Blake could see, most to Nora's hammer or Yang's gauntlets, but they just kept _coming._ How many had there been on the ceiling, watching them with multitudes of gleaming red eyes, descending in silence as they plodded guilelessly through this _deathtrap?_

 

Then, someone screamed. Blake risked a glance over her shoulder, alarmed, and caught a glimpse of Russel falling bonelessly to the floor. Cardin rushed over to him, brandishing his mace. The Spider that had attacked his partner reeled back to finish him off, and he lunged forward and smashed its head in.

 

Blake grimaced, but turned back to the press of monsters in front of her. She wanted to help—because she _would_ rather have CRDL at her back than the Grimm, if only barely—but she couldn't afford to move away from where she was.

 

One of the Spiders snapped its jaws just inches from her face, close enough that she could see inky venom dripping from its fangs. Yang pushed its head aside just in time, then blasted it into oblivion with her gauntlet. Blake offered her a nod of thanks, before returning her attention to the swarm of monsters in front of her. Seconds later, she heard Cardin yell, "Shit!"

 

"What?" Ruby called out, flourishing her scythe and decapitating two of the Grimm in one blow.

 

"They're poisonous!" As he spoke, Blake heard a nasty metallic screech—presumably one of the Grimm landing a hit on his armor.

 

"Obviously," Weiss snapped back, stepping forward and raising a wall of ice that cut a jagged path through the swarm. The Spiders paid it very little mind, simply choosing to crawl over it and continue trying to bite her head off.

 

"No!" Cardin shouted. "I mean, it's paralysis! Russ can't move!"

 

Blake clenched her teeth, lashing out in an arc to get the Spiders to back up a few paces. They did not oblige, choosing instead to surge toward her. Gambol Shroud's ribbon caught in the press, tangling on one of the monsters' legs. She was yanked off balance, but Ren caught her arm and helped her keep her feet. A moment later, there was a loud _snap_ as Nora kindly and violently removed the snag.

 

Even when her weapon was once again spinning over her head, Blake felt her heart pounding in her throat. She was certain that it was only a matter of time before something disastrous happened—and the Grimm were only too eager to prove her right.

 

The monsters thronging around Yang were all fighting blind. They were not smart, and they were not accurate—but they were many, and only one of them had to get lucky.

 

Blake didn't even see it happen. One moment, she and her partner and team JNPR were all huddled in a ragged line, blasting away at the sea of Grimm. The next, Yang slumped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, and plunged the cave into near-total blackness.

 

It took a moment for her to understand what had happened. The Grimm pressed in around her, and Blake lunged toward her partner, her _friend—_ but the wall of chitin made it impossible to reach her, segmented legs blocking her path like prison bars. One of the Spiders began spinning dark thread, knotting Yang's ankles together.

 

"Someone clear a path!" Blake shouted desperately, but she was the only one who could see, and soon even her eyes wouldn't be able to pick out Yang's blonde hair through the wall of arachnids.

 

"Flashlight!" someone screamed. "We need light!"

 

"That is _enough!"_ Blake recognized Weiss' voice, before a _blaze_ of light threw the cavern walls into stark relief. She yelped, shielding her eyes with one hand and stumbling backward as a cone of fire several yards across erupted into being and cut all the way to the back of the cavern. Standing at its end, Weiss swayed in place, using her rapier to support herself.

 

"Nora!" Blake cried out, as soon as she could push past the throbbing pain in her temple from the sudden influx of light. "I need to get through!"

 

"Got it!" Nora chirped, leaping forward and bowling over at least half a dozen of the Spiders. It wasn't exactly a clear path, but Blake didn't care—she rushed forward, dodging past fangs and slipping between long and slender legs until she spotted her partner.

 

Yang was still on the ground, covered up to her waist in silk as an absolutely _gargantuan_ Grimm hunkered over her. It looked up with at least a hundred eyes, giving Blake a look she could only describe as _greedy,_ and skittered forward.

 

"We need to go!" she heard Jaune yell over the noise of battle, and the monster's attention was diverted for a moment. Seizing her chance, Blake flashed forward with the help of a clone and slashed at its legs. Two of them on its right side were severed entirely, clattering to the floor in a pool of black ichor. It howled, but kept its balance—so she decided to try and cut off a few more.

 

"Get back," she snarled, baring her teeth in an expression that felt positively _feral._

 

Her friends had started to advance, too—Pyrrha came up on Blake's left and launched her javelin through the Grimm's abdomen. It still _didn't die—_ but it backed off, hissing and spitting.

 

"No you don't," Blake growled under her breath, tossing Gambol Shroud and yanking the beast's last two right legs out from under it. Crashing to the ground, it landed in a tangled heap in front of Yang. Her sheath flicked out, and its head rolled away.

 

"Grab Yang!" Pyrrha called to her, pulling her weapon free of the dead Grimm. "We need to retreat!"

 

Nodding, Blake scooped her partner off the floor. It wasn't easy. Yang was _heavy,_ and even if the Spiders had lost their special interest in her, they could still spot a helpless target when it was hobbling around under their noses. If it weren't for Pyrrha, she would have been overwhelmed—but every time one of the beasts lunged at them, it only bounced off her shield, or met a grisly end at the point of her spear.

 

"Follow the fire!" Ruby called as she emerged from the fray. Then, she spotted Yang and paled. "Really, really fast please!" she added, sprinting over and doing her best to support some of her sister's weight. Together, the pair of them made it to the wall of flame.

 

Weiss was waiting there for them, half-hanging off Jaune's shoulder. For a moment, Blake thought she'd been bitten—but she was still making an attempt at walking, so it had to be exhaustion from using so much Dust at once. It was serious, though, if she was willing to lean on Jaune.

 

As for Russel, Cardin had hoisted him into a fireman's carry, since he'd gone entirely limp. Luckily he wasn't wearing any heavy armor, and enormous strength was his partner's only positive quality.

 

"Stay as close to the fire as you can!" Ruby ordered, doing her best to run toward the distant end of the cavern despite Yang's weight. The Spiders were reluctant to pass through the inferno, and were instead crawling around it to come at them from the other side.

 

Pyrrha led the charge, the firelight glinting off her armor and weapons and making her look like some kind of war goddess as she waded through her foes. Dove, Ren, and Nora protected their flank, slashing, shooting, and blasting their way through Grimm at an impressive rate. Sky, meanwhile, brought up the rear, stumbling along backwards behind them and brandishing his halberd wildly at anything that moved.

 

 

 

 

It took what felt like an eternity to reach the nearest exit. Blake focused on Yang's breathing—it was harsh and loud in her ear, uneven and unsteady and maybe the best thing she'd ever heard in her life. Then, finally, they were through. Pyrrha stopped, turned, and charged back through the door, her red sash swirling around her as she went.

 

One by one, her classmates piled into the tunnel. Cardin dumped Russel unceremoniously on the ground and stood like a solid wall of steel in the passage entrance. Jaune laid Weiss down as quickly and as gently as he could, stammering out a few apologies Blake really didn't think were warranted, then went to stand beside his partner. They held for a moment, before the sheer volume of Grimm forced them backward.

 

"We can't fight this many!" Jaune cried out, grunting as a Spider leaned its full weight against his shield and snapped at his head. "Nora! Bring it down!"

 

"No!" Sky yelled back. "We might get caught in the cave-in!"

 

Ruby turned to Weiss, who was still on the ground. "Can you—"

 

"On it."

 

Jaune, Pyrrha, and Cardin all dove out of the way, and Weiss managed to point her rapier in the general direction of the oncoming horde. Ice burst from the weapon, sealing the tunnel and plunging them into total and absolute blackness, so dark that even Blake couldn't see a thing.

 

Then, a few moments later, Dove clicked on a light, revealing Weiss lying flat on her back, her sword abandoned on the floor next to her. After a cursory glance to confirm that she was still conscious—barely—Blake knelt beside Yang. She muffled a gasp as she took in the livid purple bite on her friend's left bicep. It was deeper than she'd thought, and bleeding heavily.

 

The silk would be a problem, too. She unsheathed Gambol Shroud and started sawing away. The fibrous material parted reluctantly, coating her hands as she tore it away. Bile rose in the back of her throat at the sticky texture. Wordlessly, Ruby crouched down to help her, and between the two of them they ripped the rest of it away. The lack of physical restraints only highlighted the fact that Yang still _wasn't moving._

 

"You're going to be okay," Ruby murmured. She looked around, biting her lip. "...As soon as we find some bandages."

 

Blake looked up, startled, and realized with growing dread that she had left her pack behind in the cavern. It had been second nature to slip free of it, and she hadn't spared it a thought since.

 

"Does anyone have their gear?" she called out, glancing over their ragged group.

 

"I do." Blake looked up and saw Dove holding out a roll of bandages and what looked like disinfectant. She eyed him warily for a moment, before grabbing them with a curt thanks and turning back to her team.

 

Ruby was doing her best to put pressure on the wound. Blake nudged her shoulder, holding up the first aid supplies in explanation. Her leader moved aside to give her room, and for a moment she could focus on cleaning and dressing the bite, letting her fears settle. Then, once her work was done, she spared a glance around the tunnel. Cardin and his team were dealing with Russel, who had a similar wound on his calf. Everyone else seemed tired and worn, but uninjured. Blake allowed herself a moment to feel relieved by that. It was better than dwelling on the fact that this tunnel wasn't familiar—which meant that they'd sealed off the way they'd come.

 

Sky, surprisingly enough, was the next to speak. "We left the flashlights," he mumbled, pushing a hand through his hair. It was a sobering thought. Blake did a mental headcount—Weiss, Yang, Ren, and Sky had all lost their lights. She herself hadn't bothered to pack one, and if no one else had their supplies...

 

She turned to stare at Dove, who was holding _their only flashlight._

 

"Shit," Cardin said, neatly summing up the whole situation. For once, Blake was in total agreement.


	4. Warmth

 

Cardin's curse was met with near-total silence. Pyrrha caught herself edging subconsciously toward Jaune, hands twisting around themselves as they lay in her lap. She'd never been afraid of the dark before, but the thought of being trapped in these caves without being able to _see..._

 

"Okay," said Ruby, the first to try to break the gloom that had settled over the group. "Only one flashlight, and the exit is closed up. That's... kinda bad."

 

"No _shit,"_ Cardin snarled, and Blake rose into a half-crouch, tense and ready to snap—but Dove grabbed his leader by the back of his collar and dragged him down into a sitting position. He brushed his thumb along the precious flashlight, then bent down to fish around in his pack.

 

"I have two spare batteries," he announced, pulling them out into the light. "After they run out..." he trailed off, and glanced toward team RWBY. "You'll still be able to see, right?"

 

Blake looked up, startled. "No," she admitted, and her whole body tensed.

 

"What?" Sky burst out, horror-struck.

 

"We're stuck down here with the _only_ faunus that can't see in the dark?!" Cardin snarled, clenching a fist. "What kind of useless—"

 

"It's not _magic,"_ Blake spat, shooting to her feet. "Of course I need _some_ light to work with, they're still _eyes!"_

 

"Enough!" Dove snapped, glaring at his leader. He glanced down at Weiss. "How much Dust do you have left?"

 

Weiss blinked blearily, and sat up. She dragged her rapier over to her and peered at its hilt. "Most elements are full. Fire Dust would be best for lighting our way, though, and I only have about a third of the chamber left." Dove nodded gravely, then leaned forward to check Russel's daggers.

 

"He's all out."

 

"Right." Cardin grumbled, running a hand through his hair. "So we're fucked." Next to him, Sky curled up into a ball with his arms around his knees.

 

"Not yet." Pyrrha looked up in surprise, realizing it was Ren who had spoken. He looked around, his expression grave but determined. "There were signs of excavation in that cavern," he reminded them. "And I doubt the cave we found was large enough to act as the entrance to a mine. In all likelihood, there is another way out of these tunnels."

 

"And if there's not," Nora proclaimed happily, running a hand along Magnhild. "We just _make_ one!"

 

"Let's call that plan B, shall we?" Pyrrha interjected, putting a hand on her teammate's shoulder. "We wouldn't want to bring the roof down on our heads."

 

Jaune smiled softly at her, then turned to the rest of the group. "We still have our scrolls, too," he reminded them. "They'll give off some light." His expression brightened even as he talked, like he was pulling hope from thin air and spinning it out into the world for them. Pyrrha shifted where she sat, torn between grabbing him in a hug and burying her face in her hands out of sheer embarrassment.

 

"Right!" Ruby chirped, optimistic as ever. "So we find another exit. Um..." she paused, glancing down at Yang. "At least... as soon as these guys get better."

 

"What if they don't?" asked Sky. All eyes turned to him, and he shrank into himself. "I mean... we don't know how soon they'll recover. We might run out of power before then."

 

"We have twelve scrolls," Ren replied, smiling reassuringly. "I'm sure they'll last long enough.

 

"Right." Jaune clapped his hands together. "What about food?"

 

There was another long silence, while Dove dug around in his pack. He produced a thoroughly squashed sandwich, two cans of baked beans, and several crumpled candy wrappers.

 

"Okay," Ruby declared, obviously trying to keep up her enthusiasm. "We... really don't have much food."

 

"Oh!" Jaune blurted, then fished into his hoodie. "I have a granola bar!"

 

"Great," Cardin said dryly. "You guys can share that."

 

Pyrrha frowned. "We need to pool our resources—"

 

"Fuck that!" Cardin stood up to his full height, glowering at her. "That's _our_ food. If you wanted some, you should've kept your own packs!"

 

"By that logic, it's _Dove's_ food, not yours," Blake snapped. "And if anything, we should make sure the injured have priority."

 

Cardin looked for a moment as though he was going to argue, before he glanced down at Russel. "Fine," he grumbled. His partner made a low gurgling noise.

 

"Russ!" Sky burst out, turning to stare at his teammate. His fingers twitched slightly, and his jaw began to move back and forth.

 

Relief washing over her like a physical force, Pyrrha turned to Yang. Ruby and Blake were kneeling on either side of her, but her hands were both clearly visible as they clenched and unclenched.

 

"You're okay!" Ruby crowed, leaning down and grabbing her sister in a hug.

 

"Ungh," Yang managed.

 

And slowly, fitfully, their two paralyzed classmates began to recover. It wasn't long before Yang was sitting cross-legged between her sister and her partner, wincing as she flexed her injured arm.

 

"I... hate... Spiders," Russel groaned, still lying in a heap on the floor. "And... caves."

 

"Water?" Yang croaked, leaning heavily on Ruby's shoulder. Sky turned to rummage in Dove's pack. Pyrrha watched as his eyes widened almost comically and he drew back, shaking his head.

 

"You brought _beans_ but no _water?"_ Blake burst out, incredulous.

 

"Here," Ren said, retrieving a canteen from somewhere in his coat. "It's enriched with vitamins vital to the human body—"

 

"Don't drink it!" Nora warned, eyes gleaming. "It's _poison!"_

 

"It will replenish your electrolytes," he insisted.

 

Yang eyed the container warily, then took a cautious sip. Her eyes crossed, and she hastily handed it back. "Okay, not thirsty anymore."

 

"I've got some," Jaune offered. "Regular water, I mean." He proffered a plastic water bottle—dented and crumpled by their journey through the caves, but about three-quarters full.

 

Taking it gratefully, Yang managed a clumsy sip, wincing as a few drops spilled onto her jacket. "It's like I'm wearing mittens," she grumbled under her breath, resealing the water and handing it over to Russel.

 

"I'll pass," he said, waving her off. "I think I might puke." Cardin scowled and edged away from him.

 

Yang shrugged, then got stiffly to her feet. Blake and Ruby both rose with her, putting their hands out as if to catch her.

 

"Are you sure you should..." Blake started to say, then sighed. "Never mind."

 

Her partner just grinned and staggered over to Weiss. "Here. You look pretty wiped."

 

Weiss glanced up, and accepted the bottle gratefully. "This... isn't all our water, is it?"

 

"Who cares?" Cardin broke in, pointing at the massive ice wall behind them. "We're sitting next to a heap of it."

  
"We are _not_ drinking that," she snapped back. "Not unless there's no other choice."

 

"Weiss," Yang said hesitantly. "Maybe now isn't the best time to focus on how _clean_ it is..."

 

"That's not what I meant! It's _Dust,_ drinking it is dangerous!"

 

"Oh." Yang flopped back on the ground between Weiss and Dove, deflated.

 

"It's not all we have, though," Sky said, after a moment. "I mean, Russ has some."

 

"Yup."

 

"Me too!" Nora proclaimed proudly, producing a massive canteen that was unfortunately only about two thirds of the way full. Where she'd been hiding it, Pyrrha had no idea. A few others raised their hands, Pyrrha herself among them—she made a point of never going on a hunt without more water than she thought she'd need.

  
There was a moment of somewhat awkward silence after that. It was broken when Sky glanced warily at the small glacier.

  
"Not to be that guy—"

 

"You are _definitely_ that guy," Yang interrupted. Sky made a face, but didn't contradict her.

 

_"Anyway,_ do we know how long that thing will hold?"

 

_That_ certainly caught everyone's attention. All eyes turned to Weiss again, but she only shrugged.

 

"Weeks, if it were left on its own. If the Grimm are attacking it... I don't know. Maybe days, maybe..." she trailed off.

 

"All in favor of moving on?" Jaune suggested, standing up and shifting from foot to foot.

 

"Aye!" Ruby called out. The rest of the group didn't bother to respond, just started gathering whatever possessions they had.

 

"Dove, stay in the middle," Jaune said. "We need the light, so—"

 

"Hey!" Cardin growled, rising to his full height. "He's _my_ teammate, so why don't you just—"

 

"It's a good idea," the other boy told Jaune, pointedly ignoring his leader. "At least, for now. We could rotate who has the light." He glanced thoughtfully over their group. "Actually, Yang or Russ could take it for now, since they probably shouldn't be fighting anyway."

 

"That works," Jaune replied, glancing nervously at Cardin.

 

"Yo!" Yang called out, raising her right hand as if to catch it. Weiss kicked her hard in the shin.

 

"Ow!"

 

"You can't seriously be thinking we should _throw_ our only source of light, can you?"

  
Yang flushed. "I'd have caught it," she grumbled. Her point was somewhat undermined when she stumbled, nearly falling over before Ruby managed to steady her.

 

"On second thought," Jaune hedged, looking extremely nervous. "Maybe Dove should keep it for now." Yang made a face, but didn't bother arguing with him.

 

They set off in a ragged line, with Ruby hovering anxiously next to her sister and Russ grimacing with every step. Cardin offered him an arm at one point, but he shook his head. "'Sokay," he mumbled. "Getting easier."

 

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that this wasn't the case. Yang, who had completely refused to acknowledge any sort of difficulty when they set out, was soon leaving heavily on Ruby and Blake. Dove had stepped in to support Russel, holding his flashlight in one hand and keeping his teammate upright with the other. Weiss, too, was having trouble—though, with the other two setting the pace, she wasn't suffering overly much.

 

"Let's stop here," Ruby suggested, after what Pyrrha judged to be about two or three miles. "This is probably far enough, if we make another ice barrier." She paused, glancing apologetically at Weiss.

 

"I'd rather be tired than dead," her partner pointed out, raising her rapier with a roll of her eyes. Soon, they were braced against another glacier—cold, but very reassuring.

"Right." Jaune placed his sword and shield against the barrier. "At this point, if those things get through... we probably can't outrun them anyway." He managed a weak grin, and Pyrrha beamed back at him almost without realizing it. Her partner noticed, and his own smile widened visibly.

 

Dove nodded and wedged the flashlight securely into the glacier, so that it cast a weak light over the assembled group.

 

"Awesome," Yang said, and half-collapsed onto the floor, groaning. Russel flopped down into a similar heap a few paces away from her, and Cardin settled between the two, dumping Dove's pack down by his side.

 

Yang perked up, and poked her hand into the bag. "You can't _seriously_ not have—oh, hey!"

 

"What are you—" Cardin snatched the pack away from her. Yang came away with a water bottle in hand—full to the brim, too.

 

"Geez, you guys must not have looked that hard," she teased, holding the offending item out in front of her. Cardin grabbed for it and missed—then flushed.

 

"Give it back!" he snarled. Russel, meanwhile, went pale.

 

Ignoring both of them, Yang twisted off the cap and took a sip—then choked and spat, eyes widening. Cardin froze, then slowly retreated as she turned to stare at him.

 

"Vodka," she breathed. "You brought _vodka_ to a _mission."_

 

"We, ah, I mean—" Sky stammered, shrinking away from her even though all three of his teammates sat between them.

 

"Boys," Yang said, her accusing stare morphing into something altogether more predatory. "Sharing is caring."

 

 

 

 

Cardin gaped at her a moment, before turning even redder—whether from rage or embarrassment, Pyrrha couldn't tell. "That's... I can explain!"

 

"We're trapped in a cave full of giant spiders and Deathstalkers," Blake pointed out. "I think rule breaking is the last of our worries at the moment."

 

"What?!" Weiss blurted. "They—what even—when were you idiots planning to _drink_ that, anyway? Before or after we fought for our lives?!"

 

"We weren't supposed to be fighting for our lives," Cardin grumbled. "And it was in case we had to stay the night."

 

Blake smirked. "I love drunk watchmen. They're so easy to sneak up on."

 

"Not when they're guarding _our_ campsite," Weiss pointed out. "We are _not_ touching that."

 

"Well, why the hell not?" Yang asked. "We can just pick a couple of guards that won't drink any."

 

"Hey!" Cardin growled. "That's _ours!"_

 

"Forget it, Cardin," Russel groaned. "It doesn't _matter."_ He paused, glancing around the tunnel. "And I think we could use the morale boost, anyway."

 

Yang cheered. "Party it is!"

 

"You can _not_ be serious," Weiss said flatly. "Who's going to keep watch?!"

 

"I will," Ren spoke up, voice smooth and even as it always was. He stopped, then looked around. "And Nora."

 

"Aw, Ren!" Nora protested.

 

"Never again," he said flatly. _"Ever."_

 

"We should have more than two," Weiss argued stubbornly.  
  
"Isn't it three?" Yang asked. "I mean, unless you want some..."

 

Weiss flushed. "I am _not_ staying up all night," she said, crossing her arms over her chest. "Not after using all that Dust."

 

"That's fair," Blake agreed. "And I'll pass, too. I've tried the stuff before, and... let's just say I'd rather not do it again." She pulled a face, wrinkling up her nose and making Yang laugh.

 

"Okay," Jaune declared, sounding a bit nervous. He rubbed his hands together. "Anyone else good to take a watch?" Dove nodded assent, but no one else moved.

 

"Right." The flustered way Jaune began toying with his hair was rather cute, in Pyrrha's opinion. "Four watchmen then. And we're actually doing this."

 

"If anyone's expecting to get drunk," Dove said, rather bluntly, "don't. We watered it down, didn't have enough for our whole team."

"Eh, call it a placebo." Yang shrugged, and handed the bottle back to its owners. "I already had mine, so... yeah."

 

"This is still ridiculous," Weiss grumbled.

 

The bottle made its way around, slowly but surely. None of the remainder of team CRDL really reacted to the taste, merely taking a sip—or a swig, in Cardin's case—and passing it right along.

  
Then, it made its way to Ruby. Eyes narrowing, she shot a glance at Yang—as though she couldn't believe she was _actually_ allowed to do this. She took a slow, careful sip—and yelped as soon as the liquid touched her tongue, recoiling and nearly dropping the bottle in the process. Blake snatched it deftly from her grip, smirking in a way that made Pyrrha suspect that she knew this would happen.

 

"Why?!" Ruby groaned, screwing up her face and sticking out her tongue. It was a little like watching a child bite into a lemon for the first time. Yang, meanwhile, was downright cackling.

 

"How does Uncle Qrow _do_ it?" Ruby shook her head vigorously, as though she could shake off the taste.

 

Her sister shrugged. "I think he burned off his taste buds." A nostalgic grin spread across her face. "He let me try his flask once. It kept me from drinking for like, three years afterwards."

  
Weiss stared at the pair of them in frank disbelief. "What kind of irresponsible guardian would _do_ that?" Yang and Ruby met each other's eyes, exchanging some kind of silent communication... and burst out laughing.

 

"What changed, anyway?" Blake asked, amused.

  
"Girly drinks," Yang replied. She twirled a finger, the gesture made a bit crooked by her recent paralysis. "With the little umbrellas."

 

"Of course." Wordlessly, Blake passed the bottle—now about two-thirds full—to Jaune. He examined it warily, leaning away from it as he caught a whiff of the smell.

 

"Um..." he hedged, brow furrowing in distress.

 

"You don't have to," Pyrrha assured him. She hesitated, then laid a hand on his shoulder. He turned and shot her a grateful look, then stared at the bottle.

 

"Why not," he decided, and took a quick gulp. He had apparently been anticipating the taste, unlike Ruby—but he still scrunched up his brow and nose, and passed the drink to Pyrrha as though it were a live grenade. Instead of spitting it out, though, he swallowed. His eyes watered, and he slowly lowered himself down so that his head rested between his knees.

  
"Why," he croaked. Pyrrha covered her mouth to stifle a giggle, but Nora was already belly-laughing and even Ren chuckled. So, she dropped her hand and shook with barely suppressed amusement. Jaune lifted his head weakly, and gave them a thumbs-up.

 

"I am never doing that again," he declared.

 

"See?" Yang said, punching Weiss on the shoulder. "I'm teaching them valuable lessons!"

 

And then, it was Pyrrha's turn. She glanced into the clear plastic bottle—very unassuming considering how bad it apparently was—and took a tentative sip.

 

It was hard to fight down her initial reaction—which was to spit it out as quickly as possible—but she managed. Eyes streaming much like Jaune's, she felt the alcohol burn its way down her throat, warming her to the core. The sensation was... pleasant, she supposed, but perhaps not worth the taste. Looking up, she realized with mild surprise that the bottle had already made its way around their little group, minus the few holdouts for night watch.

 

"Well," she said, swirling her tongue around in her mouth in an attempt to dissipate the aftertaste. "That was... interesting."

 

Yang whooped. "Yeah, go Pyrrha!"

 

Pyrrha flushed, feeling oddly pleased with herself. She'd been praised in tournaments before, often in those exact words... but the same sentiment being expressed just for trying something new, while sitting in a circle of friends—well, friends and CRDL—felt different. She smiled, hoping it looked as genuine as it felt.

 

"I can definitely see why you'd pass on that," Jaune told Blake, smacking his lips and grimacing. "I still taste it..."

 

"I guarantee it's better than what I had," she replied, still smirking at their expense. Yang guffawed, gesturing at the bottle.

 

_"That,_ my dear friend, is vodka disguised as water and smuggled into a school. Definitely some of the worst around."

 

"Bootlegged moonshine," Blake shot back. Yang's eye twitched.

 

"Okay, you win."

 

Weiss, meanwhile, was eyeing the drink suspiciously. "It can't be _that_ bad..."

 

Yang's head whipped around so fast that Pyrrha was worried about whiplash. "Oh?" she asked airily, her tone clashing with the devilish look on her face. "Care to find out?"

 

"No."

 

"Aw, come on!" she wheedled. "It _is_ kind of traditional."

 

"If this is some kind of idiotic rite of passage among teenagers—"

 

"I was going to say in a life-or-death situation, but sure! Let's go with that!"

 

"It's still ridiculous. Why would anyone drink it if it really tastes that bad?"

 

Yang squinted at her. "...To get drunk. Which we _probably_ won't, so I guess... to watch each other make funny faces?" At this, she turned to look in Jaune's direction. "Which was priceless, by the way." He turned a light pink, and Pyrrha patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

 

"That's stupid."

 

"Yep! Want in? I mean, it _is_ the traditional teenage experience, so..."

 

"I'd... really rather not." There was a faraway look on Weiss' face as she spoke, more softly than usual.

 

"Oh." Yang winced, then backpedaled. "I mean, it's okay if you don't want to—I, uh..."

 

"It's fine," Weiss said, rolling her eyes. "I just... don't want any."

 

"Right."

 

Pyrrha bit her lip, sharing an anxious glance with Jaune. The sudden reluctance didn't sit well with her, not after the incident from earlier.  


Ruby, who was looking between her sister and her partner with a slightly panicked look on her face, managed a less-than-smooth intervention. "That's probably the smart way to go," she said conversationally. "I mean, _ew."_

 

"Agreed," Jaune groaned. Pyrrha giggled nervously, running a hand through her hair. Personally, she could see why people drank—once they got used to the taste, of course.

 

"Your loss," Cardin shrugged, making a come-hither gesture with his hand. "Give it here."

 

Pyrrha narrowed her eyes at him, but decided that added conflict probably wasn't going to help anyone. She passed the bottle back to his team, though Yang snagged some before it reached them.

 

"Isn't that bad manners or something?" he grunted, snatching it back.

 

"Probably," Yang said cheerily. "Weiss?"

 

"Oh, definitely."

 

Yang lifted her hand for a high-five, but Weiss seemed a bit put out by the five feet of distance between them. Instead, she made a vague gesture in her teammate's direction. For her part, Yang blinked in confusion, then nodded sagely. "Right. Moving." She glanced down at her hand. "I guess it's the thought that counts."

 

Cardin took another swig of the drink. "Whatever," he grunted, tossing it to Russel, who fumbled and nearly dropped it.

"Do you think there'll be more of those things?" Ruby asked, in a rather small voice.

 

There was a tense silence, before Yang mustered a weak chuckle. "Yeah, well, next time they won't be able to sneak up on us."

 

"She's not wrong," Pyrrha pointed out. Yang stared at her—apparently she hadn't been convincing herself very well. "If we'd kept them in a bottleneck from the start, we might have been able to stand up to their superior numbers."

 

"There's no might about it," Weiss agreed. "Our main problem was light, at least at first. By the time we had that covered..." she trailed off.

 

"I feel like an idiot," Blake sighed, flopping over to lie on her back.

 

"Why?" Yang asked. She sounded genuinely bewildered.

 

Blake frowned at the tunnel ceiling—considering the angle of the flashlight, Pyrrha suspected she was the only one who could see it. "Humans never look up," she said, tonelessly. "And neither do I, it turns out."

 

"I wouldn't say _never,"_ Weiss pointed out. "If you hadn't, well... we probably wouldn't be here right now."

 

Pyrrha shivered. She could remember the sudden scream—it had taken her a moment to realize it was Blake's voice, and then... well, she'd never heard her sound that scared before.

 

"Cheerful bunch, aren't we?" Russel chuckled, sinking down so that he, too, was lying on his back.

 

"We _did_ just almost die," Ruby noted.

 

Yang broke out into a grin. "Almost!" she declared, pumping her fist in the air. "That's, like, the hunter motto."

 

Sky groaned. "You're all insane."

 

"Not me—I never wanted to come down here," Russel reminded them. "And I told you so, by the way."

 

"How were we supposed to know it was this bad?" Yang demanded—still grinning to show that she was only teasing.

 

Weiss sat up straight at that. "Do you have _eyes?_ Of course there were going to be Grimm in this cave." She made a face. "Though I admit, I wasn't expecting to be trapped underground."

 

Pyrrha smiled weakly along with the banter, but her heart wasn't in it. She couldn't help running Ruby's words through her head. _We really did just almost die._ It was true, and that was... indescribable. She'd fought before, of course—they all had. Not two weeks ago, they'd been part of a battle against the creatures of Grimm, taking place in Vale itself. Any one of the monsters there would have killed her if it could, but she hadn't felt this kind of visceral dread.

 

Then, of course, there were the tournaments. She'd experienced years upon years of single combat, until Milo and Akouo felt as much a part of her as her own hands and feet. But that was a bloodless sport. If anyone was injured, it was always accidental, always minor. The most she'd ever been hurt during a match had been a twisted ankle, back when she was around twelve. None of that was truly _deadly._

 

Nothing else seemed to compare to the feeling of helplessness that had dominated their last battle. Pyrrha had never felt less like the Invincible Girl than when she heard Blake scream, and had looked up to see what had to be thousands of gleaming red eyes, descending in perfect silence. She shivered again at the memory, and leaned instinctively towards Jaune.

 

He looked startled for a moment, then smiled warmly at her. Pyrrha felt her face flush at the realization that she'd been caught, but he didn't seem to mind. So she enjoyed the proximity, and the warmth of his shoulder as it brushed against hers. It was cold in the tunnel, probably because of the small glacier blocking half of it. Maybe they could have set up camp a bit farther away from it, but... well, it was comforting seeing something so solid at their backs. She didn't like the idea of darkness closing in at both ends of the tunnel, possibly teeming with Grimm.

 

She shut her eyes and forced herself to relax. It had rattled her, more than she liked to admit. The fighting itself hadn't been so bad—the Spiders were rather stupid, and had been trivial to deal with individually. But they hadn't been dealing with them individually, they had _swarmed,_ so thick and black that she'd lost track of Yang. Then the light had gone out, and she'd thought...

 

Pyrrha shook her head, blinking rapidly. It was fine. Yang was right there, happily teasing and joking around with the rest of them like she always did. She'd been unnaturally still, though, hanging between Blake and Ruby like a sack of laundry.

 

She hunched into herself, risking another glance at Jaune. He was watching the others, but she thought she could see tension around his eyes, a grim set to his jaw that belied his playful expression. Pyrrha nudged his arm, then jerked her head toward the tunnel ahead of them.

 

"Mind if we talk?" she whispered. He nodded eagerly, then prodded Ren and passed the message on.

 

"We won't be far," he announced, before leading the way away from their camp. He pulled his scroll from his pocket as they went, switching on its flashlight function and pointing it at the rock walls that surrounded them.

 

"You're wasting the light," Weiss said, though it was more an observation than an accusation.

 

"Don't get eaten!" Russel called after them. "Unless it's one of you doing the eating." He smirked knowingly, then yelped as Dove reached out and smacked his shoulder, _hard._

 

It took a moment for Pyrrha to understand. Face flaming, she trotted after her partner, suddenly very eager to enter the dark tunnel and hide her face. Jaune either hadn't heard, or had chosen not to acknowledge Russel. He just smiled at her.

 

"What did you want to talk about?" he asked, as soon as they were far enough from the group.  
  
"Nothing in particular," she replied, fidgeting where she stood. She wasn't sure what had come over her—maybe she was just looking for comfort. Jaune always seemed to know what to say.

 

Instead of pressing the subject, he sat down cross-legged on the ground, propping his scroll in his lap so that its flashlight illuminated the tunnel in front of them. Pyrrha followed suit, settling herself against the wall beside him. Their knees were just barely touching—it was physical contact she hadn't meant to initiate, but couldn't quite bring herself to break.

 

"Are you excited for the Vytal Festival?" he asked, into the silence. She turned to look at him, startled. Jaune just smiled again, that familiar easy smile that came so naturally to him.

 

"You said you wanted to talk about nothing in particular," he explained. "So..."

 

Pyrrha laughed, and that in and of itself came as a shocking relief. "I believe we'll do well," she decided. "You've been improving immensely these last few weeks, Jaune." His grin slipped a bit at that, and Pyrrha winced. She wished she could show him somehow that she _meant_ it when she told him he was doing well, that he didn't have to dismiss it like that.

 

"Anyway," he said hastily, "I'm looking forward to the carnival games. You know, I once won my sister a stuffed Nevermore at the ring toss? Those things are all rigged, so... pretty proud of that." He puffed his chest out, then chuckled. Pyrrha tried to smile, but couldn't force it. She loved the way he just talked, and let her stay quiet as long as she liked—but she had to say it.

 

"I'm... scared." It was quiet, almost swallowed up by the dark. Jaune stared at her a moment, his blue eyes wide. Then he reached out, and awkwardly placed a hand on her shoulder.

 

"Me too."

 

"It's strange," Pyrrha continued, staring sightlessly at the far end of the tunnel, where the meager light from Jaune's scroll gave way to shadow.

 

"It really, really isn't."

 

"No, not being afraid. I mean... this is the first time I've really thought about what being a huntress means."

 

"You mean, fighting the Grimm?"

 

Pyrrha shook her head, and hugged her arms around herself. "I mean... we could have died." Jaune nodded—not exactly an agreement, more a sign that she had been heard and understood.

 

"It's just _strange,_ because I never thought about it like that during the Breach. There were Grimm there, and we were in real danger... but it didn't feel like it."

 

Jaune stared down at his hands. "It's the dark," he said.

 

"Hmm?"  


"I mean, I think that's what it is." He glanced down the tunnel, at where the shadows covered the walls like thick shrouds. "We're powerless in the dark. That's why its scarier fighting a weak Grimm when we can't see, than a strong one in the daylight."

 

Pyrrha glanced down at the scroll in his hands, still illuminating their faces and reflecting off their armor. She curled a little further into herself, suddenly wishing nothing more than to be in their dorm room, sitting on her bed and working on one of Port's agonizing essays. But, there they were. In the dark.

 

"I think you're right," she told him, after a moment. He looked up, an unspoken question on his face.

 

"When everyone was talking about rationing our food and water, and using our scrolls for light," Pyrrha explained, "it seemed like they were... happier."

 

Jaune nodded. "See? Helplessness. It's the worst part." He grinned, though it didn't reach his eyes. "I'd know."

 

"You're not helpless," she insisted.

 

"You were there that last fight," he said miserably. "I barely did anything, just hid behind my shield."

 

"You held your ground—you helped defend the tunnel against all those Grimm!"

 

Jaune fell silent, hunching his shoulders. He looked miserable, and Pyrrha acted without thinking. She leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder.

 

"Thank you, Jaune," she told him. He stiffened for a moment, before relaxing against the wall. Through the hair that had fallen across her eyes, she could see him turn to look at her.

 

"What for?" he asked.

 

"For talking to me." Pyrrha smiled, wishing she could return one of his carefree grins, the ones that seemed to light up the world. She'd always been one to smile politely, without showing any teeth, but he seemed to appreciate the gesture anyway.

 

"Anytime," Jaune murmured.

 

They stayed that way for a while. Normally, Pyrrha was sure she'd have jumped away from him by now, flustered and confused. She supposed that was one positive side to being confronted with her own mortality—she was simply too exhausted to care. His shoulder was warm, and more comfortable than it had any right to be considering he was wearing armor.

 

Then, finally, he coughed. Pyrrha pulled away reluctantly, shooting a worried glance at him. Had she pushed too far? But he was still wearing that goofy grin. It was so easy to talk to him sometimes—and sometimes, so completely impossible. She let him pull her to her feet, holding his lit scroll in his free hand.

 

"We should probably go back," he said. "Wouldn't want them sending a search party or something."

 

Pyrrha nodded. "Of course."

 

As they walked back to the rest of the group, Pyrrha resisted the sudden impulse to grab his hand. That was too much, she knew, crossed some line she'd drawn in the sand. She bit her lip, wondering if she should just tell him, before they came back to the group and she missed her chance. But the thought of it twisted her insides until they ached, and the moment passed.

 

Their classmates were just as they'd left them, all sprawled over the cave floor and talking animatedly. As Pyrrha and Jaune approached, Yang gave a cheer.

 

"Hey! You're just in time!" she called out.

 

"Oh, no they are not!" Weiss said, sounding almost... panicked?

 

"Oh, _yes!"_ Yang insisted.

 

"I'm not doing that."

 

"Aw, please?" Ruby wheedled.

 

The two sisters were each sitting next to Weiss, coming at her from both sides with innocent, pleading eyes. Well, Ruby was. Yang was just chanting, "Do it!" over and over.

 

"Ugh, fine!" Weiss threw up her hands in defeat.

 

"Um," Jaune broke in. "What's going on?"

 

"She's gonna sing!" Nora exclaimed, leaning forward and grinning widely enough that Pyrrha could see her molars.

 

"Really?" Jaune's eyes had gone wide, and Pyrrha couldn't help but flinch at his eagerness.

 

"I know, right!" Yang agreed enthusiastically. "We've lived in a dorm together for months now, and I had no idea!"

 

Weiss pinched the bridge of her nose. "Fine. Name something, and let's get this over with."

 

"Oh!" Yang burst out, perking up even further. "Do you know _Love and Hate?"_

 

"That insufferable racket you've been playing nonstop for the past two weeks?" Weiss asked tonelessly. "Yes, and I'm not singing it."

 

Ruby's hand shot up. "Ooh, what about _By the Fire?_ Everyone knows that one!" Pyrrha blinked, a bit surprised that she, too, had heard the song. It was an old one, and had apparently first gained popularity among hunters as a way to entertain one another on long missions. Eventually it had been taken up by the public at large, to the point where it was fairly well-known in all four kingdoms.

 

Weiss frowned thoughtfully. "I suppose," she mused. Then, she looked nervously around the group and cleared her throat.

 

_"I am here by the fire,_

_Sparks in the starlight,_

_Snow falling white."_

 

Her voice was shaky at first, likely a product of her audience, but after the first few bars it smoothed out. Pyrrha found herself gaping in surprise.

 

_"And a circle all round,_

_Of friends lost and found,_

_In the dead of night."_

 

Weiss carried on, growing more confident as she went, and the first verse ended. It took a moment for Pyrrha to realize that another voice had joined in. She looked around for the source and noticed Blake sitting with her eyes shut, swaying slightly in time with the music and singing quietly.

 

_"We hold fast by the fire,_

_Dust on our blades,_

_To meet these shades_

_That watch with blood-red eyes_

_And beastly guise,_

_Until our circle fades."_

 

Pyrrha paused a moment, swept away by the song. It wasn't perfect—neither of them had practiced it recently, and there were no instruments to help them keep time. But slowly, the music picked up momentum. Ruby jumped in next, awkward and stumbling but high and sweet just the same. Jaune joined her, and before she knew it Pyrrha was singing too. There were other voices as well, deeper ones that must have been coming from team CRDL. She found she couldn't be annoyed by that, not now.

 

_"We've won by the fire,_

_The people safe and sound_

_And we with laurels crowned!_

_This glory and this war,_

_They only cost a few more_

_Of these friends I found."_

 

Her eyes slid shut, almost without her realizing it, and for a moment she felt as though she were sitting under the stars, with the wind all around and the nightmare of the caves buried somewhere far, far away.

 

_"Now I am home by the fire,_

_Rust on my blade.  
_ __  
There's no more need to be afraid—

_New armies massed_

_The burden's passed,_

_Now that my hair is grayed."_

Then, after what felt like a very long time, the song ended. She blinked her way back to awareness, turning to look around. Jaune sat next to her, grinning from ear-to-ear. Pyrrha found her eyes were drawn toward Weiss. She was sitting rigidly, rooted in place, and was staring around the tunnel, dumbstruck. "I..." she began, then trailed off.

 

"I always loved that song," Blake said, before the silence could grow uncomfortable.

  
  
"Me too," Ruby agreed dreamily. "Uncle Qrow used to sing it sometimes."

 

"That was pretty fun," Yang decided. "We should do it more often."

 

"Yeah!" her sister cried out, grinning. Then she stopped, and turned to Weiss. "I mean, if that's okay with you." Her partner didn't respond.

 

"Uh, Weiss?" Ruby waved a hand in front of her face, and she started.

 

"Hmm?"

 

"Are you okay?"

 

"Of course," Weiss said automatically. She was still staring off at a point somewhere past the tunnel wall. "I just... I never sang with other people before."

 

"Oh! I mean if you didn't want us to... Um, 'cause I know Yang's kinda tone-deaf sometimes—"

 

"Hey!"

 

"It was nice," Weiss interrupted, before Ruby could get herself too worked up.

 

"Okay," Yang said, folding her arms. "I can _kind of_ see not knowing one of my teammates was a singer, but _two?"_ She turned to Blake, placing a hand on her chest and putting on an air of mock betrayal. "And my own partner! You've been holding out on me!"

 

Blake shrugged. "I don't do it often."

 

Yang threw both her hands up. "Such a waste!" she groaned theatrically.

 

Weiss and Blake rolled their eyes in near-perfect unison, while Ruby broke into a fit of giggles. Pyrrha smiled at them, feeling oddly content considering the circumstances. She loved the cozy atmosphere they'd created, hundreds of feet underground in the depths of Grimm-filled caverns, despite all the odds. It felt almost like they were back at their dorms, all eight of them crammed into a room meant to fit four, sharing a movie or a board game. Except, of course, for the presence of team CRDL, but even they hadn't put too much of a damper on the mood.

 

Pyrrha glanced at Jaune, who was watching the byplay with an easy-going grin on his face. His eyes flickered around the room, catching the hard glow of Dove's flashlight and reflecting it back as something soft and welcoming.

 

He had been her first real friend. The awkward, uncertain boy who'd stumbled into her life without knowing her name, and had helped her to meet so many amazing people. He was so much braver than he realized. He was selfless, risking himself for the likes of Cardin even if they didn't deserve it. And he _was_ strong. Maybe not the way he wanted to be, with a sword and shield—though she hadn't been lying when she told him he was improving—but there was something there that she couldn't quite define, no matter how hard she tried.

 

Jaune looked up and caught her staring, and for a moment Pyrrha could have sworn her heart would stop. He rubbed at the back of his neck and asked, "Do I have something in my teeth?"

 

He was also, she had to admit, _very_ clueless.


	5. The Black Lake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I'm abandoning all pretense here. When school starts, I'm probably going to switch to posting on Sundays rather than Mondays regardless. May as well start now.

Blake had miscalculated. _Badly._

 

It had seemed like an obvious decision—stay away from the foul-tasting alcohol, and keep watch for a while. But then, of course, Jaune had to mention watch partners.

 

She was perfectly fine with staying awake. That wasn't a problem at all. But she was one of only four people that had agreed to handle the first two watches, since everyone else was either injured, exhausted, or had been drinking. Two of the others were Ren and Nora, which meant they were going to be partners, period. The _last_ person, the person she was to be stuck with for _hours,_ was Dove.

 

So, being the reasonable person that she was, once they started their watch Blake had crouched in the far end of the tunnel and started staring straight ahead, scanning the tunnel with razor-sharp focus and pretending she was alone. Dove, meanwhile, sat cross-legged on the passage's other side with flashlight in hand, apparently perfectly at ease.

 

That would have been... well, not _okay,_ it would have been horribly uncomfortable, but it would have been bearable. She could have spent three hours or so sitting with Dove. Dove the bully, Dove the accomplice, Dove the racist. Dove the boy who had sat and laughed as his team tormented an innocent faunus. It would have been awful, and she would have hated it, but it would have been relatively livable. This was not.

 

"I want to talk to you," Dove was saying. Blake turned and glared at him, but he seemed unperturbed.

 

"What?" she snapped.

 

"It's... well..." he paused, and it occurred to her that he looked a bit embarrassed. "It's about you, actually."

 

Blake inched away from him, dread pooling in her gut. There were so many things he might want to talk about, and none that she wanted to deal with. She didn't say anything, hoping that maybe he'd take the hint and stop talking. Then again, it wasn't as though she was that lucky. "I suppose it's something to do with your actions today."

 

"My... what?"

 

Dove shifted uncomfortably. "It's, well..." his sentence petered off, before he slumped against the wall and sighed explosively.

 

"I don't get it," he said, finally.

 

"What?" She prompted, raising an eyebrow.

 

"You're really a faunus."

 _This is it,_ Blake thought. _This is hell._

 

"Yes," she sighed, rubbing at her temple with one hand and wishing desperately that a Grimm could come charging around the corner and get him to _shut up._

 

For a moment, Dove was blessedly silent. Then, "You don't act like one."

 

"I act like a _person,"_ Blake said tersely.

 

"I didn't mean to upset you."

 

"Really?" she shot back, shooting him a sarcastic glance over her shoulder.

 

"Yes. You saved us, in that cavern."

 

Blake turned to face him then, confused. "I wasn't going to stay quiet while a Grimm landed on my head," she pointed out.

 

Dove shook his head. "I meant while we were fighting. We couldn't see, but you could. And you chose to help us until we had light." He frowned, his expression morphing into one of honest bafflement. "Why?"

 

Blake pinched the bridge of her nose. "I don't like you," she said bluntly. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to leave you to die."

 

"That's just it," Dove insisted. "You're brave, and you're smart, or at least you have good instincts. You were the first one who saw the Grimm. You're still composed, even after all this. You don't make _sense."_

 

"Did it ever occur to you that the problem is _you,_ not me?" She settled back into a slightly more relaxed position, fidgeting a with Gambol Shroud's ribbon. Dove didn't respond, choosing instead to brood in silence.

 

Then, after a moment, "I'm sorry if I offended you."

 

Blake shot him a disbelieving look. "You think I can't be a good person, because I'm a faunus."

 

"I didn't expect you to be," Dove admitted. "But... no, I'm actually rather impressed." He paused, as if deep in thought. "Maybe it's that you're a cat. They tend to act more nobly than other animals."

 

Blake could feel her eye twitching. She groaned, putting a hand over her face. "You seriously can't see the problem with that?"

 

"I suppose it wouldn't fully explain it." Dove shifted where he sat, so that his legs were stretched out in front of him. His eyes, always half closed, seemed to be focused intently on the darkness in front of them. "You can see all the way down the tunnel, can't you?"

 

"Yes," Blake said, brow furrowing a little in confusion. She really had no idea what he was getting at, and she was starting to think she'd been _very_ lucky during initiation. Things had been... tense, after she'd revealed herself. She'd expected Weiss to react badly, and she had—but she _hadn't_ thought she'd be back with them, just a few days later, like nothing had ever happened. If she'd been partnered with Dove, would she have left Beacon after being discovered, never to return? Would she even know what she'd missed?

 

"They really are cat's eyes, then," Dove continued, derailing Blake's train of thought.

 

"What?" she blurted, startled by the apparent non sequitur.

 

"They aren't slitted, though," he said, peering at her in the dark. Blake half-rose to her feet, feeling distinctly uncomfortable. It reminded her far too much of the way the police would look at her at protests, like they were trying to filter her down into her most basic components, classify them all and file them away somewhere they didn't have to deal with them anymore.

 

"No, they're not," she snapped. "And I really don't know why you care."

 

"Why are you still wearing the bow?" He asked, abandoning his first line of inquiry entirely. Blake's fingers twitched. She was itching to just _go,_ to run off somewhere she wouldn't have to talk to him anymore—but where would she go? She wouldn't leave her team—she'd made a promise, and anyway the alternative was being alone in the depths of the earth, far from any food or water. Eventually her scroll would run out of power, and she'd be just as blind as any human.

 

"You know why," she said instead.

 

"To hide," Dove replied, as if it were obvious. Blake flinched—she'd never put it so baldly before, and her team had seemed to understand... but it was the truth, she supposed. He wasn't done, though. "Why wear it _now,"_ he clarified. "We all know anyway, there's no point."

 

Blake stared at him a moment. She hadn't considered that—team CRDL had been one of the main reasons she'd been wearing the bow in the first place, living proof that Beacon was still a part of the same prejudiced mindset as everywhere else. But down here, there were only her friends, who'd already accepted her, and CRDL, who'd found out. And the Grimm—but they didn't care, and never would.

 

"I suppose you're right." She didn't take it off, though—not when Dove was still looking at her. Later, when she was back with her team.

 

He didn't speak for a moment, but she could feel his eyes on her. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, and she shifted so that her weapon was within easy reach.

 

"I want to know what makes you different," he said, after a while.

 

"Nothing," Blake snapped, exasperated. _"Nothing_ makes me different. That's what's so impossible for you to understand." Her fists clenched. "We're just _people._ My friends can see that, so why can't you?"

 

Dove blinked—at least, she thought he had. It was hard to tell. "You _are,_ though," he insisted. "Look at the White Fang." Blake tensed, but he seemed entirely obvious to her connections with the group.

 

"What about them?" she said coldly.

 

"They're violent. When they don't get what they want, they lash out like animals." A muscle jumped somewhere in her jaw. It was horrible, hearing a human like _him_ so casually display just how much damage the White Fang had done to their cause. _Like animals._ She remembered Adam, standing on the roof of that train.

 

_What about them?_

 

"We're not all like that," she countered. _"Velvet_ isn't like that, but you don't seem to care." Her voice rose in volume, more than she'd meant it to. She did her best to hush herself, so that she wouldn't wake the others. They'd need sleep, if they were going to make it through this. Yang and Weiss especially—they'd been pretty wiped out by the fight.

 

"Velvet?" Dove asked, cocking his head. The gesture made her shudder—it was almost familiar, something Ruby and Yang would do sometimes. She'd always thought it was a sister thing, a sweet quirk she'd noticed. Seeing him do it was disturbing.

 

"The girl you've been tormenting." She did her best to keep her tone cool, dispassionate, because if she _didn't_ then she wasn't sure she could keep herself from drawing her weapon, and they didn't need that right now.

 

"Scarlatina," he said, nodding. "No, I suppose she isn't violent."

 

"You don't care, do you?" Blake stared down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. Her nails bit into her palms, straining against the shield of her aura. "And you think I'm some kind of monster."

 

"I _don't,”_ Dove insisted, sounding annoyed. "That's what I've been trying to say. You're different."

 

"And so is Velvet!" She rose to her feet, towering over him where he sat. "You talk about me like I'm some kind of exception, but the White Fang are the minority! Velvet wants to be a huntress, to save people from the Grimm. She's a better person than you'll ever be."

 

Dove scowled. "She's weak," he said simply. "I would've left her alone, but Cardin could tell she wouldn't fight back and he made her a target." Something of what she was feeling must have shown on her face, because he stiffened where he sat, looking wary.

 

"We're done here," Blake snarled. "And if you think sitting back and _laughing_ while Cardin pushes people around to make himself feel a little less pathetic doesn't make you culpable, then _you're_ the animal."

 

She looked down at him, letting her disgust show. "Wake me up in an hour. We're doing separate watches." Then she stalked off, leaving Dove sitting in the dark with his flashlight.

 

Her breath was ragged and uneven when she made her way back to the spot they were sleeping in. She was _furious,_ and it was making it hard to tread quietly. Forcing herself to slow down, she crept into their little camp and toward her own patch of floor. They'd lost the sleeping bags, of course—though Russel had been given Dove's, since he'd been poisoned and its owner had a watch.

 

"Blake?" said a voice behind her. She jumped, drawing Gambol Shroud as she turned. Ruby was propped up on her elbows near the wall, her hair tousled and her eyes half closed.

 

"Ruby," Blake greeted her, wincing. "I didn't mean to wake you." She put her weapon away.

 

"You didn't," her team leader replied. "It's cold."

 

Blake glanced at the barrier Weiss had created, still sucking up all the heat in the corridor. She couldn't see her breath, but that was partly because it was so dark, even for her. The only light was the faint ambient glow of Pyrrha's scroll, propped up against the ice. They'd originally intended to sleep without it, but by the time Blake and Dove had left for their watch, they'd given up on that.

 

"I suppose it is."

 

"Are you okay?" Ruby asked, shifting so that she was sitting up straight.

 

"I... no, not really."

 

"Do you wanna talk about it?"

 

"I don't want to keep you up..."

  
Ruby giggled quietly. "You won't be. I can't get comfortable on the rocks like this."

 

Blake sat down beside her, glancing over at the sleeping forms of their other two teammates. Neither had so much as twitched since they'd gone to bed. If she looked closely, she could still see a few bits of black web stuck to Yang's socks. The thought made her shudder.

 

"I was talking to Dove," she said, after a moment. Ruby made a face.

 

"He's a jerk."

 

Blake glanced over at Russel—probably the only one of them who wouldn't wake up aching tomorrow. His head was lolling back, a thin line of drool glistening on his cheek. "I guess he is," she agreed. "I thought... I don't know, maybe they'd change, if they really thought about it."

 

"Hm?"

 

"I mean..." she hesitated. "I really thought I'd have to leave, when you found out."

 

Ruby's eyes widened. "You're not gonna—I mean—"

 

"No!" Blake said quickly. "No, not for them. I just meant..." she sighed, frustrated. "I didn't expect Weiss to change her mind."

 

"Oh," Ruby glanced over at her partner. Blake wasn't sure how much she could see in this lighting, but she was smiling. "Yeah, I was really scared when she first talked to you."

 

"So was I," Blake remembered, letting a wry grin tug at the corners of her mouth. "I was petrified. And the way she _paused,_ right after she told me she'd decided... I thought I was going to have a heart attack."

 

Ruby laughed again, softly so as not to wake their friends. "But it worked out," she said.

 

"It did." Blake reached up, pulling away her bow in a single fluid motion. Her hands fell into her lap, the black fabric twisted around them. "She found out, and she changed her mind _._ So... why can't they?"

 

"You mean, team CRDL?"

 

"Yes."

 

"I don't know." Ruby shifted, pulling her legs up and hugging her knees. "I never got why people act like that."

 

"They're taught that way," Blake replied, gripping the bow tightly with both hands. "That's what my parents always said. And when they grow up, they teach _their_ kids the same thing. Then it just... keeps going."

 

"That's sad."

 

Blake hummed in agreement and glanced over at Weiss. She was sleeping soundly with her left hand curled around the hilt of her rapier. Her grip was slack, her expression peaceful.

 

"It's no excuse, though," she said, grimacing. "Weiss had more reason to think that way than anyone, she was raised by the same people that have been propagating it. But she changed, so there's no reason they can't."

 

Ruby smiled fondly at her partner. "Maybe she's just exceptional," she joked.

 

"If that's true, then we're wasting our time."

 

"I don't think it is." Ruby turned, looking over at where the rest of team CRDL lay. "I guess... I didn't expect to be friends with Weiss at first. It took a while to really get to know her." She made a face. "I mean, maybe _friends_ with team Cardinal is a bit far, but... I don't know. I like to think they could be good people, if they tried."

 

Across the room, Blake saw Sky twitch in his sleep. She gave Ruby a grateful smile. "Thanks."

 

Ruby stood up, stretched, and reached down to retrieve her scythe. "I'll go help with the watch," she said.

 

"You don't have to—"

 

"It's okay," she insisted. Her smile faded a little. "I couldn't really sleep anyway."

 

Blake opened her mouth to argue, but the look on her friend's face stopped her. "Thank you," she said again. Ruby snapped off a mock salute, and trotted off down the tunnel. It took a long time for Blake to fall asleep.

 

When she woke again, it was to see Ren crouching next to her, shaking her shoulder. She sat up groggily, rubbing the back of her neck. Her _everything_ ached. It seemed after months of sleeping in a real bed, she'd gone a bit soft.

 

Gently pushing her head from side to side and wincing as the vertebrae snapped and popped, Blake got to her feet and stretched. Around her, the others were doing much the same thing—though Russel was still face-down on the ground, mumbling something into Dove's bedroll.

 

"Oh, get up," Cardin grunted, nudging his partner with his boot.

 

Next to her, Yang was twisting around to look at the bite on her arm. She hissed in a breath through her teeth, probing at the injury with one finger. "I think I might need more bandages," she said, gesturing at a bloody mess of cloth that lay abandoned next to her.

 

"Here," Dove called out, and tossed a roll of them at her head, along with some disinfectant. Yang snagged both out of the air with her good hand and began winding a fresh dressing around her bicep. Blake turned away. Looking at the bite made her uneasy—she must have dreamed something during the night, because she could remember hazy images of a dozen neat black bundles on the cavern floor, surrounded by burning red eyes...

 

She shook her head, willing it to clear. Glancing up, she noticed Weiss and Ruby were sitting upright. The latter was yawning and stretching, while the former was massaging her neck gingerly.

 

"I don't know which is worse," she grumbled. "No bedrolls, or no blankets."

 

"No blankets," Ruby replied instantly. She began rubbing at her arms, apparently trying to heat them up.

 

"I'm gonna go with no food," Yang said, rolling her shoulder experimentally and wincing.

 

"About that," Dove interjected, holding out a sandwich that looked as though it had been through a warzone—which she supposed it had. Yang frowned at it a moment, then glanced around.

 

"How much do we have?" she asked.

 

"That," he replied, pointing at the sandwich, "a granola bar, and two cans of baked beans."

 

Russel, who was trying to open one of the aforementioned cans of beans with one of his daggers, looked up and grunted, "Need fire." Then he blinked, apparently realizing he'd been talking like a caveman. "They're gross when they're cold."

 

"We're not using fire Dust, if that's what you're getting at," Weiss huffed. He made a face, but went back to trying to pry the lid off. Yang looked at the sandwich, frowning. Then she started ripping at it.

 

"What are you doing?" Blake demanded. Her partner turned to her, and held out a quarter of her meal.

 

"Here. I can't eat all this."

 

"No!" she insisted, trying to push the hand away. "You're _hurt,_ you need it!"

 

Yang tried to pass the food to Ruby and Weiss, but both of them shook their heads. "Guys, I'm _fine._ The venom wore off already."

 

"I don't care," Weiss snapped. "You still have a hole in your arm."

 

"Yang," Ruby pleaded, "Just take it."

 

"Come on!" Yang waved the bit of sandwich in front of Weiss' face. "You literally collapsed yesterday, there's no way you aren't hungry.

  
Weiss' eyes narrowed. "I never said I wasn't."

 

Yang turned at last to face Ruby. "I can't... I want to share. Please?" she said, softly.

 

Ruby stared at her a moment, obviously conflicted. Finally she groaned, "Ugh, fine. But you're keeping the biggest piece!"

 

"Awesome!" And just like that, Yang was back to normal. She parceled out the rest of the sandwich, then tore into her own quarter with gusto.

 

Blake looked down at the food in her hand. A minute ago she'd been famished, but now her stomach was roiling. She took a hesitant bite, and was immediately overwhelmed by guilt. It was turkey, she noticed dimly as she chewed. The whole thing tasted like ash, and she had to force it down. Her throat smarted as she swallowed.

 

"Water?" Jaune asked, holding out a bottle in her general direction. She shook her head.

 

After a moment, Russel reluctantly shared a bit of his breakfast with his team, while JNPR opened up the rest of the beans. Jaune managed to force Yang to take his granola bar, though she made him eat a piece as well. The whole affair was heavy with the knowledge that this would be their last meal for a while. When everyone had finished, Ruby hopped to her feet and declared, "Okay! Let's move out!"

 

"Hang on," Weiss said, fiddling with the hilt of her rapier. There was a small _pop,_ and she produced the cylinder containing all her Dust. "Russel, get over here."

 

He scowled at her. "Why?"

 

 _"Because,_ you obviously rely on Dust to fight. We can't have you blundering around without it. Dove said you ran out—and why you barely brought _any_ on our final exam, I'll never know."

 

"That was all I _had,"_ he snarled. "And I don't want your stupid—"

 

"Russ." Dove put a hand on his shoulder, as though to restrain him. "Just take it. We need you in top fighting condition."

 

Russel glared at Weiss for a moment, then grudgingly opened the pommel of one of his daggers. "I use mainly fire," he said. Weiss nodded, and passed him a canister of red Dust.

 

"Leave some in there," she told him, when he moved to tip the whole container inside. He glared at her. "What? Fire is the best way to make the blade glow. We might both need some. Take ice if you want, I brought extra."

 

"Fine." He tipped a bit of ice into one dagger, and fire in the other. Then he shoved the canister back at her. "Thank you," he grumbled, very reluctantly.

 

Weiss pursed her lips. "You're welcome, I suppose."

 

"Right!" Ruby seemed glad that the tense moment was over. "Shall we?"

 

They went in a ragged line, with Ruby and Weiss leading the way. Blake fell into step behind them, grimacing as they passed the spot where she'd spoken with Dove the night before. At first, the cave stayed mostly level—but that changed as they got further from their last campsite. Before long, they were forced to walk slowly, picking their way down as carefully as they could.

 

Despite their agonizing pace, there were still accidents—Jaune slipped at one point, and skidded thirty feet before he could catch himself. Later, Yang tripped over a snag in the ground and nearly fell headfirst down the incline. Blake grabbed her arm, overbalancing herself in the process, and couldn't quite banish the thought that maybe it was the venom from earlier acting up again.

 

Then, quite suddenly, their steep descent leveled off. The tunnel was once again arrow-straight, though it had widened to the point where all twelve of them could walk abreast. Dove's flashlight cast eerie shadows on the walls, ones that seemed to bend and stretch as they went. Blake nearly jumped out of her skin when she caught a flicker of _teeth_ approaching from her left side, only to realize that there was nothing there.

 

"Maybe we could play a game or something," Ruby said, into the tense silence.  
  
"What?" Weiss half-turned to look at her, raising an eyebrow.

 

"I don't know!" Ruby groaned, gesturing at the cave around them. "This place is creepy and I thought maybe if we—"

 

"What?"

 

"I'm _trying_ to explain, Weiss! Just let me finish!"

"Ruby!" Weiss grabbed her partner's arm, stopping mid-stride.

 

"Huh?"

"I didn't say that."

 

"Um..." Ruby looked around anxiously. "What do you mean?"

 

_"...do you mean?"_

 

The words seemed to come from right behind them, as though another Ruby had snuck up on them in the dark. They all whirled around, and the shadows jumped and stretched into what looked like long fingers, reaching out—but there was nothing there.

 

"It's just an echo," Yang said.

 

 _"Echo."_ They all jumped.

 

"Fuck this cave," Sky groaned, fisting a hand in his hair and holding out his halberd with the other. "And fuck everything in it."

 

_"Everything in it."_

 

"Let's not talk for a while, shall we?" Pyrrha suggested, gripping her javelin so tightly that her knuckles had gone white.

 

_"Shall we?"_

 

The oppressive silence made it somehow _worse,_ in Blake's mind. Their steps echoed, too—whenever they paused it sounded as though something else was walking behind them. Each time, Dove would whirl around, shining the light down the tunnel, and Blake would confirm with a thumbs-up that nothing was there.

 

Then, red _exploded_ into being along the tunnel. Blake drew her sword in an instant, looking frantically around—only to realize that it was Ruby's cape, reflected in a vein of dark crystal set into the cave wall.

 

Blake took to glancing up every few hundred feet. She had this strange sense of unease she couldn't quite shake, a feeling of coiled up tension in her spine that was just _waiting_ for something to jump out of the shadows. But the ceiling above them remained clear of creatures of Grimm—clearer than it ought to be.

 

Since they'd entered the cave, they'd been periodically forced to deal with the ant-like Grimm that had apparently made these caves their home. Generally they were trivial to pick off—even groups of a dozen or more of the things didn't pose much of a challenge. But walking for this long, without seeing a single one... it didn't feel right.

 

She bit her lip, then turned to the rest of the group and said, "The tunnel is too empty."

 

_"Empty."_

 

Blake flinched at the sound of her own voice, but carried on regardless. "We should have seen at least a few Grimm by now."

 

"What do you mean?" Ruby asked.

 

"Well, we've been walking for a few... hours..." Blake trailed off, realizing suddenly that _Ruby's mouth hadn't moved._

 

"Oh..." Ruby whimpered. "Okay. That's not good."

  
_"It's just an echo,"_ Yang's voice whispered over her shoulder. Blake flinched and whirled around, then yelped. The shadows on the wall were writhing erratically, and for a moment she thought— _hoped, prayed—_ that Dove was just shaking the flashlight. But he was holding it steady, his mouth set in a grim line.

 

Then, even as she watched, the shadows moved to coat the whole wall, then the floor and ceiling. It was as though they were adrift in a sea of blackness, with only Dove's flashlight to keep the dark at bay. In the tunnel ahead of them, two bright red eyes blinked open.

 

 _"Just an echo,"_ it mocked. Blake drew Gambol Shroud, looking frantically around because she honestly had no idea what she was supposed to do about an enemy that _literally_ surrounded her on every side.

 

"It can _talk?"_ Weiss blurted, incredulous.

 

 _"Fuck this cave,"_ Sky's voice snarled, _"And fuck everything in it."_

 

"I'm sorry!" the boy himself squeaked, brandishing his axe and backing up rapidly enough that he bumped into Russel.

 

She was so focused on the strange echoes, she nearly missed the monster's first strike. It was nothing but a blur, black on black, glistening in the light. She raised her sheath to block it, crying out from the sheer force of the blow as it knocked her back. Her shout folded back on itself, magnifying until it sounded as though she was screaming.

 

"Blake!" Yang called out, grabbing her arm and tugging her out of the way of another spine. Gritting her teeth, she darted forward and stabbed at the cave wall—only for her blade to skid off solid stone. The shadows parted around her blade, slick and oily and so dark she thought she could see her own reflection inside them, though there was something so warped about the image that she was nearly bowled over by a wave of nausea. She found herself floundering as she fought, especially when she kept hearing noises of distress over her shoulder. Blake turned to look every time, and _every time,_ she was nearly impaled by the monster.

 

"It's trying to mess with us!" Ruby called out.

 

_"Fuck this cave!"_

 

Frustrated, Blake lashed out at the shadows surrounding them. The cut was sloppy, pulling her off-balance. Her foot slipped against a patch of rock, and her eyes widened in horror as one dark spike shot towards her _face._ A shadow clone let her twist sideways. The attack scraped along her cheek, though her aura kept it from drawing blood. Yang leapt forward, smashing into the offending spine and shattering it. The shards melted back into the floor, then disappeared into the malignant shadows that surrounded them.

 

 _"Blake!"_ She ignored it, keeping her eyes on the spikes in front of her, only to cry out in pain as something slammed into her back and knocked her to the ground. Rolling over, she managed to block the second attack, then stumble to her feet. That really _had_ been Yang.

 

Another voice cried out, _"Weiss!"_

 

Weiss whirled around, but Ruby was shaking her head frantically. Before she could bring her sword up to block, one of the spines shot down from the ceiling, smashing into her shoulder. She spun halfway around from the force of the blow, _right toward the wall of spikes,_ until Ruby grabbed her arm and hauled her back.

 

"Fire!" Ruby shouted, then tapped Weiss twice on the arm. She darted forward and slammed her rapier into the wall.

 

The blade glowed red for a moment, and flames _exploded_ outward. Weiss was thrown into the tunnel wall, bouncing off and struggling to stay upright as she stumbled—but the shadows howled and writhed. Blake could hear herself crying out in pain, then her teammates—and suddenly it was as if all twelve of them were screaming in harmony. Her ears flattened themselves against her head as her eyes watered from the sheer volume.

Then, all at once, they stopped. Two red eyes emerged behind them, _burning_ with rage. The shadows were noticeably thinner now, but they were undulating faster than ever.

"Run!" Ruby yelled. She led the charge, slashing spines out of the way and opening up a path through the Grimm and out into the tunnel. Blake didn't even hesitate—she grabbed Yang's arm and sprinted for safety.

 

"It's following us!" Sky screamed from the back of the line. Ruby shot a glance over her shoulder.

 

"That was the last of my fire Dust," Weiss reported.

"Got it!" Russel dropped to the back of the group. A massive fireball blasted down the tunnel, before the rest of them turned and fled.

 

"I'm out, too!" he called out as he sprinted to catch up.

 

"Just keep running!" Ruby shouted.

 

And they did, for what felt like hours. Blake had never had much of a problem with her endurance, but soon enough even Yang was panting for breath. They turned a corner, and Ruby nearly ran right into the wall with how fast she was moving and the way Dove's light kept bouncing back and forth. As they went, Blake thought she could hear a strange rushing sound growing louder and louder in the distance.

 

Eventually Blake stopped jumping at _every_ shadow and instead began picking out the more suspicious ones to devote her attention to. The strange noise reached a high enough volume that her human classmates had noticed, and it started to seem like they'd actually lost the Grimm.

 

"Okay!" Ruby chirped. "Now we just have to—"

 

"Stop!" Blake screamed, eyes widening as they caught sight of a deep, black shadow even she couldn't see through. Not a Grimm, as she'd first thought—a _cliff._

 

Ruby tried to obey. She dug her heels in immediately, then skidded another few feet as her momentum carried her headlong down the corridor. Her semblance was speed, and it let her decelerate a lot faster than anyone else would have been able to.

 

It wasn't enough.

 

Blake dove forward, pushing herself off a shadow clone. She caught a fistful of Ruby's hood, just as her leader went tumbling into the abyss. The sudden weight dragged her forward, and for a moment she was upside-down and utterly certain that she was about to fall to her death.

 

Then, she stopped dead and slammed face-first into the side of the cliff. Straining her neck to look up, she found Weiss and Yang each holding onto one of her legs. Below her, Ruby was breathing hard and clinging to her cloak for dear life.

 

"Okay," Yang said shakily from above them. "Let's never do that again."

 

"Agreed," Blake groaned. The blood was already rushing to her head, as she felt the other two starting to pull her up. And then, she looked down. Really, properly _looked,_ when she wasn't focused on whether or not Ruby was still attached to the hood she was holding. The ground looked red, from here.

 

"Quiet!" she whispered frantically, ears flattening themselves against her hair in sheer terror. Ruby squirmed in midair for a moment, then followed her gaze to the cavern below. She made a small noise in the back of her throat, then fell silent.

 

There had to be millions of them. They moved like blood through a heart, pulsing in and out of the cavern through tunnels wide enough to fit the whole of Beacon, if Blake was right about the sheer scale of the place. She could see Grimm of every shape and size she'd ever heard of, and quite a few that she hadn't—there were Spiders, Beowolves, Ursai, the newly-christened Workers, and more exotic Grimm like Deathstalkers and even a few Goliaths. The whole scene was lit incandescently to Blake, but even the humans must have been able to see. She could make out more of the massive Dust crystals they'd walked past earlier—though these gave off a cold, sterile sort of light.

 

Her mouth hung open as she felt herself slowly sliding back upwards, and her gaze was drawn almost magnetically to a vast gulf of blackness in the sea of red eyes and bone plating. Its texture looked unpleasantly greasy in the eerie light of the Dust crystals.

 

At first, she assumed it was some sort of underground lake, an oasis the Grimm had gathered at for some unknown reason. Then, she noticed the smog. It trickled in through dozens of smaller tunnels, all congregating at a point nearly a hundred feet in the air and cascading down in a massive waterfall of filthy sludge, creating the deafening roar that they'd been hearing for what had to be miles. There was no doubt—it was made of the same dark mist that formed whenever a Grimm was killed. Even as she watched, she could see strange shapes clawing their way free of the muck, shaking off droplets of slime and joining the press of monsters that was swarming away from it. These were Grimm—Grimm being _born._

 

 

 

 

Then, Yang's hand was on her shoulder, hauling her back so that she could reach Ruby. Blake fell away unresisting, feeling oddly numb. "They don't die," she mumbled, staring down into the cavern. "They just come back here. They don't _die!"_

 

"What?" Yang heaved her sister up over the rim, before wrapping her in a hug. "What are you talking about?"

 

But Weiss' eyes were already widening. "It's... some kind of spawning pool," she breathed. "Look."

 

"What do you mean they don't die?!" Sky hissed, too loudly. "We kill them all the—" he cut off abruptly, staring open-mouthed over the ledge. "Oh, _fuck."_

 

All the monsters Blake had thought she'd executed—they'd blown away as smoke on the breeze, only to collect again in some subterranean ocean of darkness. And then, from there... they came back. None the worse for the wear, and ready to fight again. Even as she looked, she knew in her bones that this couldn't be the _only_ place like this—millions of Grimm there may be, but she knew there were types native to other kingdoms that weren't represented here.

 

How were they supposed to fight an unkillable enemy? No matter what they did, the Grimm would always return—but the people that they killed never did. Hunters needed resources to fight back—metals and gunpowder and Dust, all lying in finite deposits under the earth.

 

"We're going to lose," she realized. "Eventually... civilization is going to fall."

 

"No..." Ruby whispered. "That can't..."

 

"It doesn't matter right now," Weiss hissed. "We have to—"

 

"Doesn't _matter?!"_ Cardin half-shouted, before Dove clapped a hand over his mouth.

 

"Keep it _down,"_ he breathed. "Unless you want to die _right now._ "

 

Blake sank against the tunnel wall, cold stone digging sharply into her back. She couldn't focus her eyes, not when they kept flickering back to the cavern, to the sea of Grimm and the slick, oily depths of the spawning pool. Something rose in the back of her throat, and then she was gagging on nothing, dry-heaving into empty air. There was nothing left in her stomach to throw up.

 

"Oh gods," Sky was muttering, over and over. "Oh gods, oh _fuck,_ oh gods..."

 

"Shut _up!"_ Cardin grunted, kicking his teammate in the shin. Dove whirled around and gripped the front of his shirt, before Russel stepped in between them and forced them apart. Blake couldn't bring herself to care.

 

"We need to go," Jaune whispered urgently. "Now."

 

"Like fuck are we going _back!"_ Russel insisted. "That thing's just gonna eat us!"

 

"Right, because forward is a _much_ better option," Weiss snapped.

 

"Wait!" Jaune cried out, before covering his own mouth with one hand. He held up a finger. "I think I've got something. There are Beowolves and Goliaths and stuff down there, right?"

 

"Among other things," Weiss agreed. "Things we have _no_ hope of fighting by ourselves."

 

"That's what I'm saying!" Jaune knelt at the edge of the tunnel and peered over the edge. "They're not all Grimm that live in these caverns. So... they have to be going to the surface."

 

"It's a way out!" Yang exclaimed, before quieting herself with a muttered curse.

 

"Exactly! We just need to figure out how to sneak down there."

"Are you _insane?"_ Weiss pointed in the general direction of the cavern. "There's no way we're getting past all of that, not without a really good plan." She half-turned to peer over at her partner, but Ruby was still staring at the massive lake.

 

"Okay..." Jaune allowed. "So... we need a smaller tunnel, where there'll only be a couple Beowolves or something."

 

"We'd have to eliminate any that notice us quietly," Ren pointed out. "So that we don't bring the rest of them down on us."

 

"Alright," Weiss said. _"How?_ How do we get over there, how do we deal with individual Grimm without raising the alarm, how do we follow them all the way to the surface?"

 

"I think we could climb around the lip of the cavern," Jaune mused.

 

"That's hardly going to be quiet if one of us falls."

 

"Well, do _you_ have a better idea?!" he snapped, irritated.

 

"No—but these are questions we need to ask, if we're actually going to do this."

 

Jaune sat back, rubbing a hand against his temple. "Right. Okay. So we climb around, and if one of us falls... um, I guess we make a daisy-chain again?" He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "That's all I've got. If one of the Grimm spots us... if it happens before we get into a smaller tunnel then I don't think there's much we can do, but..." he turned, glancing around the tunnel. "Ren, Blake, could you take one out without making any noise?"

 

Blake started at the sound of her name. She'd been listening in a daze as her friends talked strategy, finding herself unable to tear her thoughts away from that lake, and from all that it implied. There was a massive hub of Grimm activity right under their feet—why had no one ever noticed it before? If the Grimm didn't die, why hadn't they already wiped out humanity? There was nothing stopping them from mounting an all-out assault—Blake guessed the sheer volume of the monsters that were spawning even as she watched could easily overwhelm Vale's defenses if they kept on coming.

 

Maybe they were just stupid—that's what she'd always been taught. But if they were, how had they kept this place hidden so long? And why hadn't they at least destroyed the village the twelve hunters-in-training had originally been tasked to defend, since it was sitting right on top of one of the entrances?

 

 _It's like cattle,_ Blake realized. _We could kill them at any time, but we don't—because we need them alive to make more of themselves._ It made a twisted sort of sense. The Grimm were vicious when it came to attacking machinery, or any villages that strayed too close to their territory. Yet, at the same time, there were hundreds of small towns on the outskirts of Vale at any given time, any of which they could easily wipe out before any hunters responded to the distress call.

 

 _Livestock,_ she thought, despairing. _The most logical explanation is that we're all livestock._

 

"Blake?"

 

She jumped again, though this time she managed to focus on Jaune. His face was drawn and worried, and as she looked toward Weiss and Yang, she found much the same expression mirrored in them as well. It took a moment for her to remember the question.

 

"Yes," she croaked. "I can kill them quietly, as long as there aren't too many at once." She wouldn't be able to use Gambol Shroud the same way she normally did, with the ribbon, since that relied on gunshots to change its momentum. But most Beowolves were easy enough to deal with if she had the sheath and blade of her weapon. With Ren and the rest of them backing her up, there shouldn't be a problem.

 

"What about following them?" Weiss asked, though her tone was a bit softer now. "If we're killing them, there won't be much of a trail."

 

"It's the same thing we've been doing," Ruby said quietly. Her partner turned, then nodded encouragingly. Yang tightened her grip on her sister's shoulder, pulling her into a sideways hug.

 

"Even if we kill a few," Ruby went on, "there'll still be more going to the surface. So we just do what we've been doing, except instead of following the mist, we follow the living ones as long as we can before they notice us."

 

"Okay," Yang declared, making as though to clap her hands together but thankfully thinking better of it. "We have a plan."

 

"An insane plan," Russel grumbled.

 

"They're always like that," Weiss said. "But they usually work. Somehow." Ruby beamed, not at all reassuringly.

 

"Let's go, then." Jaune approached the ledge in a crouch. He led the group, grabbing onto the rock face with both hands and swinging himself out into the abyss. And with agonizing slowness, he made his way along the wall of the cavern, moving hand over hand into open air. Nora followed after him, more subdued than usual but still eager to climb around on a cliff above a sea of Grimm. Ren, too, went along without complaint. Pyrrha seemed to shake herself for moment, then disappeared over the edge.

 

Before long, Yang approached Blake and put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, then let her partner guide her over to the cliff. "C'mon," she said, dropping over the edge and climbing across the rock face. Blake followed. She was surprised that she could move at all, but the stone was rough and craggy and relatively dry, which meant she could navigate it easily. Too easily—more than once, she caught herself losing focus and letting herself be drawn into her thoughts.

 

 _Later,_ she thought, gripping the rock in front of her hard enough that she might have drawn blood if it weren't for her aura. She couldn't get lost in negative emotion, not when it might alert the horde. Every movement felt much too loud in the open space, and she kept stealing glances below her.

 

They'd only gone about two dozen feet before Jaune leaned away from the cliff and pointed to a small opening about halfway up. A group of Beowolves were making their way toward it, scrabbling along a narrow path that had been worn through the rock. Otherwise the passage was empty, and there were far less Grimm in the area immediately below it—likely because it was at the edge of the cavern.

 

The group descended slowly, until they were less than a hundred feet above the tunnel entrance. One of the Beowolves lifted its head and sniffed. They froze. It twisted around, nostrils flaring. For a moment, no one dared breathe. Blake felt as though she was choking on her own heartbeat. Then, ever so slowly, it raised its head and looked directly at them.

 

"Blake!" Ruby whispered frantically, and Blake jumped.

 

She landed on the monster's back without a sound. It opened its mouth to growl, then choked on Gambol Shroud's blade as she slid it through the Beowolf's throat. Sliding off, she turned to face the other two. One stepped forward, snarling. She bisected it in a single fluid motion. The other was looking at her, teeth bared. It was savoring her fear—she couldn't stop it in time, and they both knew that.

 

And then, it _howled._ She lunged, planting her blade through its chest. It was dead before it hit the ground, but the damage was already done. Millions of heads turned all at once, and every single pair of red eyes fixed themselves on Blake. Her mind went entirely blank.

 

Then there was a hand on her shoulder, gripping her so tightly that she whirled around, expecting an enemy. But, to her shock, it was Ren. He put a finger over his lips, then closed his eyes. A wave of calm apathy washed over her, overriding even the overwhelming panic she'd felt in the face of all those Grimm.

 

She didn't quite understand what it was that he'd done until the Grimm started to look away. Blake was not relieved—only calm, indifferent. When Ren pulled her towards the cave entrance they had cleared, she followed without complaint. The rest of them were already inside, rushing away from the cavern as quickly as they could without making too much noise. Ren let go of her, and Blake almost collapsed. It was all she could do to keep moving.

 

They hadn't made it more than a dozen paces when another howl sounded. Jaune glanced anxiously at Ren. "Can you hide us again?"

 

"No." Ren was panting, and Blake thought she could see beads of sweat on his forehead. "I distracted them for a moment, but now they know we're here. I can only conceal one or two people at once, there are too many of us."

 

"Weiss can close the tunnel," Ruby suggested, but Weiss shook her head.

 

"That many Grimm? They'd break through, it wouldn't hold them more than a few seconds."

 

"No choice then," Jaune decided. "Nora! Bring it down!"

 

"Got it!" There was a series of metallic clangs as several grenades bounced down the passage. Blake whirled around and met the eyes of something dark and amorphous that was growing fleshy black limbs even as she watched. Its distorted red eyes gleamed hungrily, it reached out towards them—and the world went pink.

 

Blake was knocked to the ground, and not even her aura could fully shield her from the blow. Her elbow cracked on solid stone, and there was a warning twinge in her right hip. But all of that paled in comparison to the _noise._ There was a bang that she felt in her bones, and a world-rending crack. Rocks crashed to the ground, showering them all in dust and stone fragments. Her ears were ringing, and it felt as though the top of her head had been cleaved in two with an axe.

 

Slowly, dazedly, Blake dragged herself to her feet. The tunnel had gone pitch-black again, now that they were cut off from the glowing Dust crystals that had lit the cavern. For several seconds, she couldn't hear anything either, aside from a high-pitched ringing noise. There was a muted scuffle, and Dove's light flickered on. The other end of the tunnel was gone, replaced by a wall of rough stone rubble thick enough that, even when her ears recovered, she could detect no sign of the Grimm on the other side.

 

"I think we're okay," Ruby panted. Blake swayed in place, staring dully at the place where the tunnel entrance had been. She still couldn't hear anything, but she found herself backing away anyway.

 

"We should go," advised Ren. "I'd rather not find out if that will hold."

 

With each step away from the cavern, it seemed as though Blake's body was growing heavier, weighing her down until it was all she could do to keep moving. Finally, Jaune gave the signal to stop—they were safe now, or at least as close as they were going to get. Blake swayed slightly where she stood, then slumped against the cave wall and slid to the floor. The impact made her wince, but she couldn't bring herself to move once she'd stopped walking.

 

Yang flopped down next to her with a muffled groan, running a hand through her hair and sending it spilling out onto Blake's shoulder. It smelled like lavender. Weiss sat on her other side, breathing hard—though her own descent was far more graceful. It didn't take long for Ruby to join her, still staring off into space.

 

Team CRDL all collapsed on the ground in a line. Cardin was glowering at nothing, and there were tear tracks on Sky's face. Jaune and Pyrrha ended up next to Ruby, with Ren and Nora sitting cross-legged in the middle of the tunnel. No one said anything.

 

Yang was the first to stir. She leaned forward, craning her neck to look past Blake and Weiss. "Come here," she murmured. Ruby got up and walked over, only to be pulled down into a tight hug.

 

"Yang!" she protested. "I'm fine, I'm not a little kid anymore!"

 

"I know," Yang murmured. She didn't let go.

 

Blake watched as Ruby relaxed by degrees, before leaning in and wrapping her arms around her sister, burying her face in her hair. Her breathing hitched, then slowed.

 

To their right, Ren and Nora were curled into one another. His eyes were closed, and she had grabbed a fistful of his coat and didn't look like she'd be loosening her grip anytime soon. Pyrrha had taken hold of Jaune's arm, though her gaze was focused intently on a point somewhere past the tunnel wall.

 

After a moment, Blake looked down and realized that Weiss was staring at the two sisters with a strange, longing expression on her face. Hesitantly, she reached out to lay a hand on her friend's shoulder. She stiffened, then leaned into her side. Blake's other hand found Yang's sleeve, and for a moment she could almost forget the oily lake, and the monsters crawling free of it. Gritting her teeth, she blotted the world out and focused on the smell of lilacs.


	6. Inspiration

"We should go," Jaune said.

 

Pyrrha barely stirred. Her hands had gotten wound around his arm somehow, though she couldn't remember when it had happened. It was warm and solid, and she wasn't sure she _could_ let go if she wanted to.

 

No one else moved, either. But Jaune wouldn't be deterred—he pushed himself to his feet, and Pyrrha had to stand along with him or risk losing her grip on his arm.

 

"Come on, guys," he insisted. "The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can find some food."

 

That seemed to shake the rest of them out of their reverie. Pyrrha couldn't bring herself to care. Her stomach felt hollow, but she suspected that even if she had something to eat, she wouldn't be able to keep it down. Still, she followed after her partner as he began marching purposefully down the tunnel.

 

Pyrrha stumbled as they went. It was hard to keep her feet under her when her mind was in such a jumble. The Grimm didn't die. What were they supposed to do, if their ancient enemy was fated for victory? She'd always known she would be a huntress, had dedicated thousands of hours of training toward that goal. Hours she might have spent making friends, during the lonely years before Beacon—and for what?

 

She glanced up at Jaune. His face was lost in shadow, now that Dove was behind them with the flashlight. Reluctantly, she dropped his arm. They walked in silence, except for the scrape of their feet against the stone floor—and the staccato clicking of Weiss' heels. It was almost like a metronome, counting out an endless tempo as they moved.

_Tack._ Dove shifted the light, and the shadows bent in such a way that Pyrrha imagined seeing another of those Spiders crawling along the walls.

 

 _Tack._ Sky made a small whimpering noise. Pyrrha heard it as a menacing growl, and had to force herself not to point Milo at him.

 

 _Tack._ Blake flinched, ears pinning back against her head as she scanned the tunnel behind them. Pyrrha strained to see something, anything—but by the time Dove pointed the light in the right direction, Blake had already relaxed.

 

 _Tack._ Over and over.

 

Her eyelids started to droop before long, despite how tense she was. It was impossible to maintain constant vigilance, and soon enough she was barely even reacting to the strange sounds and warped shadows. Her feet moved automatically. Mindlessly.

 

Ren and Nora walked beside her and Jaune. Nora was uncharacteristically silent, and Ren... well, Ren was characteristically silent. They both stared off into space, dazed. Pyrrha didn't need to look around to know that the other two teams were similarly grim. No one was talking, and part of her was glad—she didn't want to think about any of it. Instead she focused on her boots as they moved, up and down. Her fingers felt numb.

 

Then, as they were plodding along, the light began to flicker. Pyrrha stopped dead, whirling around to stare at Dove. He dropped into a crouch, setting his flashlight on the floor and fumbling around inside his pack for the spare batteries. Beside her, Jaune pulled out his scroll. The light died, plunging them into total blackness. For a frozen instant, all she could hear was her classmates' harsh breathing. Finally, a soft blue glow lit up Jaune's face, and nothing else.

 

"I can't _see,"_ Dove hissed. "Bring it over— _damn it!"_ There was a metallic clatter as something hit the floor.

 

"Stop!" Blake's voice sounded from somewhere to Pyrrha's left. "Let me." A muffled shuffling noise, and the flashlight flickered back to life. Pyrrha's heartbeat slowed to a more normal pace.

 

"That's all our batteries," Dove said gravely.

 

"Then we use the scrolls," Ruby agreed. "And, I mean, I doubt we'll be down here long enough to use up the charge on all twelve of them.

 

"Please don't jinx it," Sky whimpered.

 

"If we _are,"_ Dove mused, "Water is going to be a bigger problem."

 

Weiss made a face. "I don't _like_ it, but we could use Dust. The problem is... there's a good chance we'd get sick afterwards."

 

"How sick?" Yang asked.

 

"I don't know!" Weiss burst out. "All my instructor ever told me was that I shouldn't _drink_ the highly volatile material I'd been putting in my sword, I didn't think to ask _how sick_ it would make me!"

 

"Probably better than dead, at least," Jaune interjected, putting his hands up in a placating gesture. "We should keep going."

 

Pyrrha managed a weak smile at that—she had no idea how he was being so calm through all of this, but she was glad. She was having a hard time mustering the energy to _walk,_ let alone keeping everyone else from being at each other's throats.

 

Her good mood didn't last long, though. The conversation suffered a premature death as their little group marched on through the pitch-dark tunnel, and Pyrrha felt her mouth tightening into a grimace. No one had mentioned food—they had no way of obtaining it, anyway.

 

She knew a person could survive for weeks, even as much as a month, without eating, but Pyrrha herself had never gone without for that long. Her time in this cave was already the longest she'd ever been hungry. She wouldn't starve, not this quickly, but how long would she stay alert? How long would she be able to fight? How long would she have the strength to help, if they had to carry another of their friends after they were bitten by a Spider? What could they have done for Yang, if Blake and Ruby hadn't been able to lift her?

 

Pyrrha flinched, barely holding back a gasp as the taste of blood filled her mouth. She'd been chewing on her lip without noticing. It was a bad habit she'd broken years ago, but that had a tendency to resurface when she was particularly stressed.

 

When she glanced up, she found Nora was staring at her. Her teammate had been almost entirely silent since... well, since their world had fallen apart. Pyrrha hadn't been paying enough attention to fully comprehend how strange that was, but the look on her face... it wasn't quite a frown, but there was definitely something melancholic about it. The expression just looked _wrong_ on Nora.

 

Then, she forced a smile. It was off—too tight at the corners, not quite reaching her eyes—but she slung an arm around Pyrrha's shoulder and said, "Wanna play I Spy?"

 

Pyrrha blinked. "I... um..."

 

"Let's see... I spy with my little eye, something yellow and brown—"

 

"Yang," Ren said flatly, from Nora's other side.

 

"Ugh, fine. I spy with my little eye, something blue and—"

 

"Sky."

 

"Something green—"

 

"Me."

 

"Ren!" Nora whined. "Stop guessing so fast!"

 

"We're the only things in the tunnel, Nora," Ren pointed out.

 

"Okay, so... what about Simon Says?"

 

"I'm pretty sure Simon just says walk, Nora," Jaune said gently. "We need to get out of here."

 

"Well, _duh,"_ Nora admitted, "but Simon could also say walk _backwards."_ She then turned around and started backpedaling, before bumping into Jaune. Pyrrha giggled.

 

Nora's eyes lit up in excitement, her grin widening as she said, "Simon says skip!" No one else seemed to acknowledge the order, so she eventually gave up and went back to walking normally. Then, after a moment, "What about punch buggy?"

 

"No!" Ren burst out, and everyone turned to stare at him. He coughed into his hand. "Let's... do something else."

 

"We could tell stories," Jaune suggested. "You know, stuff we did at home, or at Beacon."

 

Nora perked up even more at that. "Ooh! Did I ever tell you about that time Ren and I joined the circus?"

 

Pyrrha could feel a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "I believe you mentioned he looked dashing in a clown outfit, yes."

 

Ren, who didn't seem embarrassed in the least, nodded gravely. "Balloon animals are more difficult to make than you might think."

 

"No way," Yang interjected, pointing accusingly at Nora. "I thought you made that up!"

 

"Nope! I can still juggle—hey, Russel, can I borrow your knives?" Russel, who looked genuinely panicked at the question, shook his head frantically.

 

Cardin, meanwhile, crossed his arms over his chest. "Would you _shut up?"_ he snarled. "We're trapped in a cave full of Grimm, could you at least take it seriously for _five minutes?!"_

 

"Morale is important," Ren snapped, eyes narrowing. "And besides, the time will pass faster if we have something to do." Grumbling to himself, the leader of team CRDL turned away and glared at the wall instead.

 

Yang coughed awkwardly. "Anyways," she chirped, "I have some fun stories from when Ruby first discovered her semblance—" She broke off with a muffled grunt as Ruby jumped on her back and clapped a hand over her mouth.

 

"No, she doesn't!"

 

There was a brief scuffle, then Ruby yelped and released Yang, nearly falling over in the process. "Ew!"

 

"She licked you, didn't she," Weiss sighed, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. "Children. Both of you."

 

Ruby tried to wipe her hand on Weiss' jacket. Her partner shrieked and ducked sideways to keep Blake between them. Pyrrha had to put a hand over her mouth to stifle a chuckle, though Yang was already pointing and cackling. With a mischievous glint in her eye, Ruby darted forward, stretched her contaminated hand toward Weiss—and ran directly into Blake. They went down in a heap.

 

Yang, still laughing, leaned down to offer them a hand up—though she playfully snatched it away when Ruby reached for it. "Other hand," she suggested.

 

"It's _your_ spit," Ruby grumbled mutinously. She did switch, though, and her sister pulled her effortlessly to her feet.

 

"Need a hand, partner?" Yang drawled, nudging Blake's shoulder. The girl looked up, and Pyrrha could see that her mouth was set in a grimace. She seemed on the verge of tears.

 

Ruby, seeing this, nearly fell over herself apologizing. "I'm _so_ sorry, I kind of wasn't thinking and, I mean, normally you'd see me coming and move, not that it's your fault or anything I just—" she stopped herself, hands clenching and unclenching as if she didn't know what to do with them.

 

"It's alright," Blake mumbled, not quite meeting her leader's eyes. "I was distracted." She got to her feet on her own, and kept walking.

 

Their good cheer vanished instantly, and Pyrrha winced. Yang moved to her partner's side, putting a hand on her shoulder. "I guess we should probably talk about... all this." If there was one thing Pyrrha _didn't_ want to do, it was that—but Jaune was nodding in agreement. Ruby glanced glumly at the floor, but offered a shaky thumbs-up.

 

"So... the Grimm don't die," Jaune said, into the silence.

 

"And everything is fucked," added Russel.

 

"We don't know that," Ruby insisted. She hugged her cloak tighter around herself.

 

"I think we do." Blake's voice was flat, almost robotic. "If we can't kill them, then we'll never get rid of them. It's only a matter of when we run out of Dust and steel."

 

"My father..." Weiss began, before breaking off and glancing apologetically at Blake. "I've listened to him talking about business, sometimes. There have been a _lot_ of mines shut down because they weren't finding any Dust anymore. I've never even _heard_ of a vein like the one we saw yesterday. If that was the kind of thing people used to be mining..." She trailed off uncomfortably.

 

"It's gotten more expensive, too," Russel grunted. Weiss looked up, startled. "Not the SDC stuff," he added. "That's been pretty much the same, but everything else has been getting pricier. Not by a _lot,_ I only really notice 'cause I always get whatever costs the least. Used to be a bunch of different brands, now it's always the SDC." Blake and Weiss shared a tense look, but said nothing.

 

"That doesn't mean there's nothing we can do," Ruby said stubbornly. "There has to be a way."

 

 _"What,_ Ruby?" Blake snapped. Her voice broke mid-sentence as she spread her hands out, pleadingly. "What are we supposed to do?"

 

Yang stepped between the two of them, putting a hand on each of their shoulders. "Hey—" she began, but Blake cut her off.

  
"This isn't a fairytale!" she burst out, shrugging her partner's hand away. "Just because we _want_ there to be a solution, doesn't mean there _is_ one."

 

Pyrrha caught herself biting her lip again. She wanted so badly to interject, to say that Blake was wrong—but she couldn't. Her whole life, she'd been so sure that it was her destiny to play her part in the fight against the Grimm. She'd never thought the threat would be ended in her own lifetime, not really, but she'd wanted to contribute as much as she could. To help ensure that someday, humanity wouldn't be confined to a few bright corners of the world, surrounded by a sea of darkness and hostility.

 

She waited for a moment, hardly daring to breathe. The whole scene was the fraught with tension. Pyrrha could see Blake and Ruby staring at one another, and Yang glancing helplessly between them. Weiss, too, was looking on with rapt attention, fists clenched at her sides. Dove had turned the flashlight on them as well, bathing Ruby's face in light—and Blake's in shadow.

Ruby stood her ground. "Yes, there _does!"_ she half-shouted. There was something fierce in her stance, in the way she set her jaw. "We've done impossible things before—I mean, we're still standing here, even though we got swarmed by Spiders and had to cross a whole cavern full of Grimm! I never thought..." her breath hitched for a moment, before she gathered herself. "I never thought I'd make any friends at Beacon, either. But I _tried,_ and here I am! We can't just give up!"

 

"I'm not giving up." Blake's arms were wrapped around her midriff, but her gaze was hard. "Of course we're still going to fight—if we don't, we'll _die_ down here. But even if we get out of this cave, what then? Are... are we going to keep risking our lives until something finally kills us, just to, _what?_ Move the Grimm somewhere else?!"

 

"We'll be protecting people. Isn't that enough?"

 

"How? How are we supposed to protect anyone if the Grimm could just—" Blake stopped, then shoved a fist in her mouth and bit down, _hard._ Yang yelped and leapt to her side.

 

"Hey..." she soothed, grabbing her partner by the wrist and tugging her hand away. It didn't look like there was any blood, but Pyrrha could see a livid bruise already forming on Blake's knuckles. "It's alright—"

 

"It's _not!"_ Blake wrenched herself free.

 

Pyrrha slumped against the cave wall. She could see her hands trembling, even in the dim light. It wasn't something they liked to dwell on... but the average Hunter lived to the age of about twenty-eight. Some of them would die fighting the Grimm—and they'd never make so much as a dent in their numbers. A strangled sob formed in the back of her throat, though most of the others were too wrapped up in the argument to notice. Then she felt a hand on her arm, one that made her flinch. She looked up, and met Jaune's eyes.

 

"Let's go," he whispered, jerking his head toward the tunnel. She could see a spot of light in his pocket, from the flashlight on his scroll. Pyrrha stumbled numbly after him, clinging to his arm like it was the only solid thing in the world. She needed that, right now—awkward feelings be _damned._

 

"I told Ren," Jaune murmured, when the last sounds of raised voices faded behind them. "So no one's going to panic or anything, once they notice we left."

 

"Thank you," she choked out. Her nose was starting to run, and part of her was absolutely _mortified_ that he must surely be able to see it.

 

"Do you want to talk about it?" he asked. Pyrrha shook her head, then nodded, then buried her face in his shoulder.

 

"Um," he hedged, patting her back.

 

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, voice muffled by his arm. She wasn't totally sure whether she was apologizing for crying in front of him, or for bringing him out here, or for ruining his shirt.

 

"It's okay." She could feel the vibration as he spoke, a low hum against her cheek.

 

"I think I do want to talk about it," she decided. Some part of her was hoping that he could just make everything better, like he had before—but she shouldn't expect that. Not with something like this.

 

There was a moment of silence, as Jaune waited for her to start. When she didn't speak, he eventually cleared his throat and said, "It took me a while to get it, you know."

 

Pyrrha reluctantly moved away so that she could see his expression. It was pensive, relaxed even—she could feel her face flush. _How_ was he so calm?

 

"What do you mean?" she asked, and he smiled.

 

"I mean, when Blake said that they don't die. I didn't get it. I was just thinking, 'Wow, that's a lot of Grimm.'" Pyrrha giggled despite herself. It sounded a little bit hysterical, even to her own ears.

 

"Then, when I did figure it out..." he trailed off. Pyrrha watched, fascinated, as his mouth twisted into a frown. His face was so expressive, sometimes—like he wore not only his heart but his whole being on his sleeve.

 

"I started thinking that there was nothing I could do. I mean, look at me." He laughed humorlessly. "I cheated my way into Beacon, I can still barely handle keeping my shield up, what am I supposed to do about an enemy that's impossible to kill?" Pyrrha opened her mouth to say something, to tell him he wasn't useless—but he was smiling again.

 

"Then I looked around." He turned toward her, blue eyes sparkling in the light of his scroll. "At team Ruby, Ren and Nora, _you._ And I realized that... even if I can't believe that I'd be able to stop it, I do believe in you guys. If there's something, anything out there that could finish the Grimm for good, you'll find it." His grin widened. "And if there isn't... I don't think that could stop you."

 

He put a hand on her shoulder, beaming. "And I'll be here to help, however I can."

 

Pyrrha _stared_ at him, mouth gaping open. "That's... I..." she blurted. For a moment, she swayed slightly on her feet. Then she launched herself forward and threw her arms around him. He rocked back, letting out a small grunt as the air was crushed out of his lungs.

 

 

"Thank you," she murmured, trying to push all the gratitude she felt into those two words.

 

"Anytime," he replied.

 

"And, Jaune?"

 

"Yes, Pyrrha?"

 

"You're selling yourself short." She broke the hug, stepping backwards so that she could look him in the eye. His gaze was closed off, with that far-off look he always got when she praised him. Like he wasn't listening anymore. She wasn't going to take that, not this time.

 

"There _is_ greatness in you, Jaune," she told him. "You have this way of inspiring... people." She looked away, not quite able to meet his eyes—because she'd wanted to say _me,_ you inspire _me,_ but hadn't had the nerve.

 

He stared at her a moment, dumbstruck. Then a wide, open smile spread across his face. "Thanks," he said, beaming.

 

Pyrrha wiped her eyes and returned the smile gratefully. Maybe she couldn't beat back the forces of darkness, maybe everything she'd done would be in vain—but, for the moment... that was okay. She would do her best, and she wouldn't be alone.

 

She took in Jaune's expression for a moment—the easygoing grin, the shining blue eyes, the little tuft of hair that was doing its best to abandon him entirely, sticking straight up toward the ceiling. Pyrrha wanted to know how he did that. Here they were, probably miles underground by now, in a cave full of deadly Grimm, not even an hour after they'd learned that the human race was doomed—and it felt all of a sudden like they were standing out on the lawn in the height of spring, listening to the wind in the branches.

 

It was only when he shifted uncomfortably that she realized she'd been staring. She looked away hurriedly, momentarily overwhelmed. A quick step back did little to ease the sense that he was _far_ too close.

 

"Um, Pyrrha?" he asked, scratching nervously at the back of his neck. "Are you okay?"

 

"Of course," she lied. Inside she was floundering, groping for something solid and safe to think about—something that wasn't her partner, since she still couldn't muster up the courage to just _tell_ him. Her fingers twitched, settling on Milo to ground her. "We... should probably find the others."

 

She didn't really _want_ to. For all she knew, Blake and Ruby were still arguing and she wasn't sure her newfound peace of mind would survive it. It didn't _feel_ fragile—it felt as though the sky itself could come crashing down on their heads, like she could be dropped in the midst of that cavern full of Grimm and still feel like taking on the world—but she didn't want to test it yet. The problem was that if she stayed here, she would almost certainly do something drastic.

 

Jaune, who seemed entirely unaware of all this—thank _god_ —merely smiled and nodded. She followed after him, trying very hard not to stare and not entirely succeeding.

 

Their friends were not, it turned out, still arguing. That was encouraging. The tense silence that filled the air like a noxious gas was not. Yang had stepped between her sister and her partner. An arm was slung over each of their shoulders, and she herself was acting as a physical barrier separating them. Only Nora glanced up when Jaune and Pyrrha returned—she winked rather suggestively, but made no other comment.

 

"Um, hey!" Jaune blurted, quailing slightly as everyone turned to look at him. "What's going on?"

 

"We're meditating silently on the fragile nature of our existence," Nora replied amiably. "It's _boring."_ Pyrrha giggled, covering her mouth with one hand.

 

"Officially, it's a water break," Ren clarified, "though we were also waiting for you two to rejoin us."

 

"And it's hard to have a water break with no _water,"_ Cardin grumbled.

 

"You're the ones who decided to bring vodka instead," Yang pointed out.

 

"Are we out already?" Jaune asked, shocked.

 

"Well, between the twelve of us... yeah."

 

"I can make ice," Weiss added, "but we should wait until we absolutely _cannot_ continue without it. Until then... mild dehydration is probably the better option."

 

"We need to keep moving, then," Jaune decided. Then he paused, looking slightly flustered. "I mean, thanks for waiting and everything, but... uh, we're here now."

 

"If it was just _you..."_ Cardin grumbled under his breath. Pyrrha narrowed her eyes, but Jaune didn't even acknowledge him. He wasn't worth it.

 

They set out again, with Jaune and Pyrrha in the lead. Nora started humming something slightly off-key after a few minutes, which Cardin objected to until Ren and Jaune joined in. Ruby skipped for several hundred yards, until Weiss grabbed her by the hood and neatly clotheslined her. Pyrrha kept stealing glances at her partner, then trying to force herself to stare straight ahead. She didn't have much success.

 

Dove was a few paces behind them, still holding out his flashlight—though the darkness seemed to swallow its beam after a few dozen feet. It was unnerving, though she supposed it was only because this section of the cave was a good deal straighter than the rest. The whole thing just kept going, endlessly.

 

Eventually, they came to a fork in the tunnel. Unlike the last few times that had happened, there weren't two separate paths in front of them—one intersected the cave at an angle, striking out diagonally back the way they'd come.

 

"Okay," Ruby said, from somewhere behind them. "Now we just need to wait for another Beowolf."

 

"Actually, I don't think we do." Pyrrha looked around, startled. It had been Blake who'd spoken, for the first time since she and Jaune had ducked away from the rest of the group. She was still staring off into space more often than Pyrrha was entirely comfortable with, considering she was the only one of them who would definitely be able to tell that a Grimm was coming before it was within biting distance, but the fact that she was talking was encouraging.

 

"What do you mean?" Ruby asked. Her tone was quizzical rather than defensive—apparently she'd already forgiven her friend after their argument earlier.

 

"Look at the shape," Blake replied, pointing. "I'd guess both of those—" she gestured to the way they'd come, as well as the tunnel branching off of theirs, "—divided off of this path. And if they did, it seems like the way out should keep going in more or less the same direction, rather than doing a one-eighty and heading back toward that cavern."

 

"That makes sense," Ruby agreed. She looked around. "Everyone okay with that?" Jaune flashed her a thumbs-up, as did her sister. Weiss nodded. No one else moved.

 

"I'll take that as a yes!"

 

They were only a few paces past the junction when Blake stiffened and whispered, "There's something coming." For a moment, Pyrrha could hear nothing. Then, there was a quiet shuffle and what sounded like a plaintive whine.

 

"Beowolf?" Ruby whispered.

 

"Probably," Blake replied, eyes fixed on the tunnel ahead. "It looks like the right—yes, that's a Beowolf." The shuffling grew louder, faster, until a white mask emerged snarling from the gloom. The monster lunged straight at Pyrrha and Jaune.

 

She caught the first attack on her shield, knocking out several of the creature's teeth. Then she stepped back and let Jaune take a swipe at its head. The Beowolf made a strange yipping noise before lurching away from them in a clumsy dodge. It stood for a moment, watching them warily. There was barely an instant to register the fact that she _still_ heard shuffling, even though the beast in front of her wasn't moving. Then, she heard a grunt of pain and the light went dead.

 

Pyrrha's heart pounded in her throat as she ducked behind her shield, ears straining for any sign of— _behind her._ She lashed out, only to be met with a clash of steel on steel and a curse. "I'm sorry!" she blurted, but whoever it was had already gone.

 

Then Russel cried out, and there was a jarring clatter of metal on stone. Pyrrha turned toward the noise, only to yelp as teeth closed around her shoulder. The Beowolf grunted as it strained against her aura.

 

 _I know where you are, now,_ Pyrrha thought. She dropped her shield, reached out and grabbed the monster by what she assumed was its face, fingers finding purchase somewhere on its bone mask. Then her right hand rammed her javelin into center mass, or what she thought was center mass. There was a low groan, and the Grimm collapsed. She was borne to the ground, hissing in a breath when her head cracked against the stone floor. Her aura protected her from the worst of it, but it had still _hurt._

 

"Pyrrha!" shouted Jaune's voice from somewhere to her left. Distantly, she registered other, similar cries—but she could only answer one.

 

"I'm alright," she confirmed. "The Beowolf is dead."

 

"Russ!" Cardin snarled. "Where the hell are you?!"

 

"It got my leg," Russel groaned. "I think it's a Centipede!"

 

"Someone get us light!" Cardin snarled. There was a metallic screech, and he began cursing sulfurously.

 

"Hang on," Jaune said, "Let me just—gah!"

 

"Jaune! What's happening?!" Pyrrha reached out, groping blindly with her free hand. Her searching fingers brushed against fabric, and she grabbed at what felt like a wrist. Jaune screamed.

 

"It's me!" she said quickly. "What's—"

 

Her head snapped back, stars popping up in the fringes of her vision. Pyrrha fell sideways, landing painfully on her shoulder. Jaune, too, had hit the ground hard, judging by the noise his armor made.

 

 _"Light, damn it!"_ Cardin howled. "It's _biting_ me!"  
  


"Weiss?" Ruby called out. "Can you use your sword?"

 

There was no answer.

 

"Yang? _Yang?"_

 

"Someone get out their _scroll!"_ Cardin growled. "How hard is it to—" he cut off with a grunt, and something _hissed._

 

"Here!" Ren shouted—and there was light. It wasn't much, Pyrrha could barely even tell where _he_ was, let alone what had just knocked her over. But it would be enough for Blake.

 

"Spider!" she shouted, and the air grew thick with gunshots. Pyrrha scrabbled to find her feet, only to feel something pressing against her back, leaning on her to keep her down. Her javelin shifted, turning back into a xiphos, and she slashed it blindly into the space above her. It clattered off chitin, and there was an indignant screech before something jabbed at her. Whatever it was bounced off her aura, and Pyrrha kicked out in desperation.

Her foot connected—and the Spider bit down on it. Pyrrha silently thanked every deity she could think of that she wore armored boots, because she wasn't entirely sure her aura could have stopped that attack on its own. Even as it was the bite had pierced through the metal, and she could feel it straining against the barrier of her soul. The force behind the fangs must have been enormous.

 

Pyrrha pulled her xiphos in front of her, shifted it into a rifle, and fired blindly. This time, there was a satisfying pained wail, and the weight on her chest vanished.

 

"Jaune?" she called out. "Are you alright?" Her partner did not reply. Dread pooled in the pit of her stomach, but she forced herself to her feet and turned her rifle back into a javelin. Then she whirled it around, probing the air around her.

 

Blake's advice echoed in her mind a second too late— _Humans never look up._ She felt a pinch at her shoulder, and barely had time to cry out before her legs gave out underneath her. Numbness spread up her fingertips, and she flopped facedown on the cavern floor. Blood rushed in her ears as her heart worked in overdrive. She strained to push herself upright, to reach for Miló, to wiggle her toes. Her body didn't respond.

 

"Pyrrha!" Blake's voice seemed oddly distant. She could _feel_ the creature above her, even though it made no sound. It was a sort of presence, a pressure at the back of her neck as it drew closer, and closer...

 

And then, there was _noise._ A gunshot, and _not_ one of Blake's. She heard a loud _crack_ just above her head, and a squeal of pain. The Spider hissed menacingly, and Pyrrha could imagine it drawing itself up to its full height, eyes bulging in their sockets.

 

 _Eyes,_ she thought absently. _They were glowing, before._

 

"Where is it?!" Ruby's voice said, from somewhere behind her. "I didn't hit Pyrrha, did I?"

 

"You got it," Blake replied. "A little to your left—now!" Another shot, and another howl from above her.

 

"Ren!" Cardin shouted. "Turn on the _flashlight!"_

"I can't find it!"

 

"You _what?!"_

 

"It's under extras!" Nora told him. "No, not there—that screen, right there!"

 

"What? That's a calculator!"

 

 _"Guys!"_ Ruby yelled. "We need light, _now!"_

 

"A few inches to your right—no, down a bit—there!" _Bang!_

 

"Ren, come on! Just look under extras!"

 

"It's not there! There's just a calculator and a compass!"

 

 _I'm going to die,_ Pyrrha thought, somewhat hysterically. _Not fighting for a village, not in combat with my friends... but because the flashlight app isn't under extras._

 

"Hand it over, Ren, it's right there—"

 

"No, it isn't! Look!"

 

 _"Just take a fucking picture!"_ Cardin bellowed, at the top of his lungs. And Ren obeyed.

 

A terrifying freeze-frame flashed before Pyrrha's eyes. She didn't have a good angle—she barely had _any_ angle, with her head on the floor. But she could see eight spindle-thin legs, coated in armor and tipped with hooked claws—all hovering menacingly above her.

 

"Die!" Cardin shouted, and there was a sickening crunch. Some Grimm's death rattle filled the tunnel, and there was a _bang_ as Ruby took another shot with her rifle. Something shattered, and bits of bone rained down on Pyrrha from above.

 

Ren took another picture. Ruby fired again, aiming for the chink she'd just made in the monster's armor. The Grimm gave a final squeal, and died. Pyrrha was almost absurdly grateful that it didn't fall on her.

 

"Is everyone okay?" Ruby's voice called out, as darkness fell again. Another flash lit up the room for an instant, though now all Pyrrha could see was the cave floor, and a bit of wall.

 

Ruby seemed to realize that most of them weren't in any fit state to answer. "Okay, so who's still standing?"

 

"I am," Cardin grunted.

 

"Nora and I," added Ren.

 

"And me and you," Blake confirmed. The rest were silent.

 

"Ooh, boy," Ruby sighed. "I... really don't think we can carry all of you. Um... Hang on. We'll try and get you untied, at least."

 

Pyrrha was momentarily confused. Untied from what? Then she remembered the thick, oily silk that had bound Yang's ankles after her previous encounter with these monsters. Bile rose in the back of her throat, but she forced the feeling down. As it was now, she might choke.

 

It took a long, awful few minutes before the others got to her. It was Nora who knelt next to her, slowly easing her into a sitting position—though she only realized it when Ren took another photograph, showing her a glimpse of her friend's worried face hovering over her. Then she was upright, at least partially, and Nora positioned her against the cave wall. Once her back was supported, Pyrrha was left alone again. There was silence, save for some quiet shuffling as the rest of the wounded were tended to. Then Cardin's voice rang out.

 

"Give me that," he snapped. Ren's constant pictures stopped. For a moment, all Pyrrha could make out was the faint glow near the center of the tunnel. And then, there was light. She was momentarily blinded, and tried to squeeze her eyelids shut against the sudden brightness. It was slow, sluggish, but after a moment darkness once again ruled her vision. Panic filled her then, and it was a struggle to open them again. But open they did, and then she was finally able to assess the condition of her other teammates.

 

It wasn't pretty. Pyrrha herself hadn't been wrapped up at all, in fact most of them hadn't, but Sky looked as though he was wearing a black straight-jacket and Jaune's arm had been bound to his chest, his sword seemingly glued to his limp hand. Weiss and Yang were leaning next to one another against the opposite wall, their ankles tangled up in a dark, sticky net. They were both wearing matching expressions of blank surprise frozen on their faces. Pyrrha would have shuddered, if she'd been able to move.

 

Ruby had knelt next to her teammates and appeared to be trying to cut them loose with her scythe, all without accidentally removing any limbs. Blake stared at her a moment, before apparently deciding that the situation was as well in hand as it could be, considering the circumstances, and crouched down to tend to Jaune. Ren glanced at his guns, then looked reluctantly at Sky. He sighed, and got to work.

 

Nora, who didn't have a bladed weapon and would have done _far_ more harm than good trying to get them out, sat crosslegged next to Pyrrha.

 

"Okay," she chirped, nodding as though she was responding to something Pyrrha had said. "So those things suck."

 

"No shit," Cardin shot back. He chuckled darkly, then nudged Sky's bundle with his foot. His boot stuck to the silk. Cursing, he pulled himself free and drew his mace. Pyrrha couldn't be sure, but she thought Sky's eyes might have widened in panic.

 

"Let me," Ren said quickly, waving Cardin away as he continued to saw at Sky's bonds.

 

Eventually, they were as clean of the silk as they could be. The few leftover strands stood out starkly against their clothing, particularly for Weiss, but they were free to move. Well, theoretically.

 

Pyrrha was starting to feel pins and needles in her fingertips, though she had no idea if that was a good sign or not. She might have asked Yang or Russel, but she couldn't move her mouth.

 

"Right," Ruby huffed out, collapsing into a sitting position next to her sister. "We're gonna make camp here. 'Cause we don't really have a choice."

 

"I slept through last night," Blake said. "I could keep watch."

 

"Sounds great. Ooh!" Ruby turned to look at Cardin. "Could you show me where the flashlight thing is?" His face was turned at an odd angle, but Pyrrha could swear she saw his eye twitch.

 

"Idiots," he muttered under his breath, but he pulled out his own scroll and shoved the screen at Ruby. "Here. See? It's not that hard."

 

Ruby nodded sagely, as though she'd just been shown a sacred martial arts form by a wise old hermit. "Awesome. We should be good, then."

 

"This uses a lot of charge," Ren observed. "I've lost three percent already."

 

"Our lives depend on our scrolls' battery life," Ruby realized. "That's... I think kind of poetic? Or ironic, maybe?" Weiss somehow managed to glare at her, despite not being able to move anything but her eyes. They were, Pyrrha supposed, _very_ expressive when it came to irritation or anger.

 

Nora and Ruby went around again after that, gently laying them all on their backs so that they could sleep. It was deeply uncomfortable. Pyrrha was still wearing her armor, there was a rock digging into the small of her back, and she couldn't change position. Still, she was grateful for the shift. She wouldn't be trying to sleep anytime soon, of course—but this way, she would always be looking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's strange trying to write Jaune from Pyrrha's perspective. I'm not normally the hugest fan—I mean, I don't hate him or anything, but he's not really one of my favorite characters. But now I'm writing for someone who likes and maybe even loves him, and it's just odd. Forces me to consider the good in him, though, and I did find quite a bit of it. I like how even though he starts out as a complete mess, every time he realizes that he's been doing something stupid or selfish, he grows the hell up. I mean, he starts off so caught up in being the rugged masculine hero that he refuses Pyrrha's training, saying he's no good if he can't do it himself—side-note, how the hell does he think she or anyone else he knows learned to fight? Because I'm pretty damn sure it involved teachers—and then he finishes the next volume by wearing a dress to cheer her up. Iunno, I kinda like him as the bumbling dork that screws up at being a hero, but works hard to learn from his mistakes and do better.


	7. To Have Hope

 

When Sky's big toe twitched for the first time, he broke down crying. It wasn't the first time—when the light had gone out he'd been sure his heart would just _explode,_ and if he'd been able to see at all then the tears blurring his vision might have been a problem.

That had been... not fine. Not even a little fine. But he could hear Dove and Russ and Cardin all around him, and he knew it would be okay. Schnee's sword would start glowing, or Yang would catch fire, and then he'd be able to see again.

 

But they hadn't. There was a chaos of screeches yells and metallic clashes, and then the noise of fighting went dead. He couldn't hear anything from Russ or Dove, just Cardin cursing. Sky felt a surge of pure _panic,_ and his halberd slipped right out of his hands. Then something stabbed him, and he was being _wrapped up,_ and Belladonna had shouted that there was a Spider.

 

He could see it then. Not really, not with his eyes, but the fear in his mind sharpened into something so intense that it seemed as though he could make out the bulging red eyes that had dangled above him just yesterday. A scream froze in his throat.

 

Then it was over, and Lie was cutting away the silk wrapped around his chest. Bright magenta eyes skipped right over him, impassive—but the stuff was hot and itchy and a constant reminder of just _what_ eight-legged horror had rendered him immobile. Then Ruby helped him sit up, and he wanted to cling to her arm like a child, hiding from the dark. He didn't, but that was only because he couldn't.

Belladonna's presence was comforting like nothing else really could be. Her eyes— _inhuman eyes—_ cut through the gloom waiting at either end of the tunnel. He felt a bit sick, thinking that. Scarlatina's eyes would've done the same.

 

After a while, Ruby returned to lay him gently on the cavern floor. He tried to protest, because he didn't _want_ to sleep, he didn't _want_ to be looking anywhere besides the tunnel—but his lips wouldn't move and his tongue felt as thick as a snake and too big for his mouth.

 

The rest of them started joking and laughing, and he'd been at a total loss at how easy they made it sound. Ruby in particular chatted a lot, mostly to herself—though Nora joined in more than once. The two of them addressed their fallen teammates almost casually, and Sky couldn't understand how people so blasé about danger could even _exist._

 

To Sky's relief, Ruby decided to do her best to keep the immobilized students distracted. She was mostly hovering over her teammates, but the fact that she was there at all made the darkness seem a little less threatening. Especially since she still had her weapon out, and the past few hours had instilled in him an immense respect for that rifle.

 

Now, as he started to regain feeling, he only wished he could _see_ the other students. He wanted to reassure himself that they weren't dead, even if slightly over half of them had been paralyzed. Somewhere to his left, someone managed a weak cough. It was impossible to tell who it was. He heard Ruby's voice, though.

 

"You're okay!" she whispered enthusiastically. "I mean, sorta. You will be, anyway." There was a feeble groan.

 

He worked his jaw, ignoring the pins and needles. Frowning, he tried for a sentence— _I'm alive_ —but it came out as a garbled mess. Next to him, Russ, or at least he thought it was Russ, said something that sounded suspiciously like the word 'fuck.'

 

It was a horribly slow thing, but control over his extremities eventually started to return to him. He wasn't alone, either. Before long all of them were starting to twitch, though Yang and Russ seemed to take a little longer to recover. Meanwhile, the few of them that had come out of the fight unscathed got to watch their friends make funny faces and try to remember how to do things like talk and flex their arms. Sky really would have preferred if Cardin couldn't see him flail around under the influence of Spider venom, but his leader seemed mostly concerned with Russel.

 

Sky wasn't strong enough to push himself upright at first, but he managed to reach out and grasp at the air, and Ruby understood his meaning. She trotted over to him, after a round of encouragement for her friends, and leaned him against the wall again. The hand on his back was comforting and warm, and he felt suddenly ashamed. He wasn't sure why—he hadn't been the only one downed by the Spider. Maybe it was just that he was surprised Ruby had bothered. He hadn't thought she liked him much... or at all.

 

Soon enough they were all sitting up under their own power, and the stream of mostly incoherent mumbling coming from Russel had sharpened into what was _definitely_ cursing. Sky looked around, located his halberd in the middle of the tunnel, briefly contemplated trying to crawl over and get it, then gave up. If another of the Spiders caught them by surprise, Sky wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it if he couldn't stand up properly, weapon or no weapon.

 

Russel seemed to think differently, and made Cardin retrieve both his daggers from where they'd fallen. Jaune, too, had his sword—though that was mostly because it had been lying right next to him. If Sky remembered right, he'd gone down with the thing glued to his hand. He tried not to remember the way his own halberd had clattered to the floor, a good half a second before he was poisoned.

 

Belladonna ended up taking a seat cross-legged in the center of the group, panning her gaze slowly back and forth. It made Sky feel a bit like a mouse cowering under a dresser, but he was glad of it all the same. Everyone else was encouraged to get some rest, either to prepare for the long walk tomorrow or to flush the last of the venom out of their systems. Most of them laid down and, as far as he could tell, dropped to sleep.

 

Sky followed their lead, more out of a strange sort of peer pressure than anything else, and spent a few minutes staring at the insides of his eyelids. That got intolerable very quickly, and he sat up again. Around him, he could see his classmates lying back with their eyes closed, breathing evenly—all but Belladonna, obviously. She half-turned toward him.

 

_Can't sleep,_ he mouthed. She nodded.

 

Having his eyes open, it turned out, wasn't actually that much better than leaving them closed. Belladonna's scroll was held in her lap, flashlight pointed down one side of the tunnel. Every so often she would switch, flipping the light around and scanning the other direction. Sky didn't have her eyesight, though. The shadows hung thick and oppressive in the relatively cramped space, and had a nasty tendency to take on the shapes of Spiders crawling toward him. Sky knew they were only shadows—but he'd also fought a monster made out of them earlier that day, so he thought he could be forgiven for his paranoia. Either way, he was nervous and jumpy and every time he managed to stop himself from watching the eerie darkness, he started thinking about that cavern.

 

He'd always known intellectually that he was going to die at some point. It was just a fact, and one he'd never liked to think about any more than he had to. But when 'I will have to die eventually' turned into 'I am very likely to die in the next forty-eight hours or so,' it made him feel horribly nauseous. Add to that the fact that the human race as a whole was doomed to fall pretty much whenever the Grimm got their act together and attacked en masse, and he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to sleep again. How could he, when the second he closed his eyes could be the very moment the horde was sighted on Vale's borders, the last instant before the fall of civilization as he knew it?

 

Rubbing his forehead viciously to try and dispel his thoughts, Sky cast about for something else to capture his attention. Belladonna was sitting still, almost unnaturally so. He briefly considered trying to talk to her, but... well... her eyes were _unnerving._ Every time they passed over him, he felt some small and primal part of himself shiver and try to edge away. Maybe it was the color, gold and catlike, coupled with the knowledge that she actually _was_ part animal. Or maybe, it was just that she clearly disliked him.

 

He almost spoke up anyway. The silence was suffocating, and his fear coiled around itself in his gut like a living thing. He'd been afraid before—sometimes it felt like he was always afraid. But this was different. He couldn't run away from it, it was too big. Instead it made him feel sick to his stomach, sweaty and jittery and utterly useless. His hands shook as he held them out to examine them, tracing the lines on his palms and trying to think.

 

Sky counted squares for a while. One, four, nine, sixteen, twenty-five. His breathing slowed, mind going blank as he remembered the familiar rhythm. Thirty-six, forty-nine, sixty-four—that was a nice number, clean in its own way. Easy to cut up into even pieces. Sort of like Sky would have been, if the Spider were a little faster. He tried to swallow and nearly choked on a lump in his throat, then squeezed his eyes shut. "Eighty-one," he breathed, barely moving his lips. "One hundred, one twenty-one, one forty-four, one sixty-nine."

 

Belladonna looked over at him, piercing eyes narrowing in annoyance or curiosity. He didn't know which it was, so he shut his mouth and tried to focus past the roaring in his ears. _Two twenty-five... I always forget sixteen._ It was easy, though. Just take sixty-four, multiply _that_ by four. One twenty-eight, two fifty-six.

 

Seventeen squared. Twenty squared was four hundred. Subtract nine from that, then two times three times seventeen. So six times seventeen, that'd be... sixty plus forty-two, one hundred two. Add nine, one eleven. Subtract that from four hundred... "Two eighty-nine," he mumbled.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

Sky winced. _Super hearing,_ he thought. _Right._

 

"Counting squares," he admitted. "It helps me relax."

 

The faunus raised a single eyebrow. He couldn't see her face that well, shrouded as it was in shadow, but she seemed taken aback. "That's... different."

 

He flushed, not entirely sure which was worse—being heard doing that by _Cardin,_ or by a veritable stranger that almost certainly didn't like him. Probably Cardin, if he thought about it. At least Belladonna didn't sleep in the same room as him, usually.

 

"What do you do when you run out?" asked a third voice. Sky jumped, alarmed. Though Schnee was still curled up on the ground, one blue eye had cracked open.

 

"You're awake," Belladonna noted.

 

"Obviously," her teammate snapped back, rolling her eyes. "I'm not fond of the idea of being unconscious and immobile, at the moment."

 

There was a momentary pause, until Sky realized that Schnee was still looking at him. He remembered abruptly that he'd been asked a question. "I don't have them memorized," he explained. "Not all of them, anyway. I just multiply in my head. That's what makes it a good distraction."

 

He seemed to have piqued the other girl's interest, now. She pushed herself upright, rather stiffly due to the Spider venom. "I didn't exactly take you for an intellectual."

 

Sky felt his face turning red again. He didn't like this kind of attention, _certainly_ not from one of, if not _the_ top student in theoretical classes. Talking to Dove was relaxing. Being stared at by the girl he'd seen set fire to most of a stone cavern and a closet faunus that had watched him tease one of her kind? That was very unnerving. He didn't bother putting up any defense, just sort of shrank into himself and wished heartily that his partner was still awake.

 

The Schnee's gaze sharpened, turning eerily calculating for a moment. Sky felt very much like an ant under a magnifying glass, shriveling up under close inspection. Then, she huffed and turned to her teammate. He couldn't help but feel as if he'd failed some sort of test.

 

Desperate to escape the sudden scrutiny, Sky cleared his throat and said, "I think I'll try to get some sleep." The other two didn't acknowledge him, so he curled up on his side facing the wall. His eyes drifted open and shut intermittently until he eventually relaxed his shoulders. _Three twenty-four, three sixty-one, four hundred..._ The tension drained out of him as he went, until he felt himself starting to drift off. Then, Schnee spoke again.

 

"What do you think of all this?"

 

"You heard most of it," Belladonna hedged. Sky couldn't see her from where he was, but she sounded uncomfortable.

 

"I suppose." Schnee's tone was different now, softer, and Sky felt suddenly like he was trespassing on something private. He supposed that was exactly what he was doing—eavesdropping—but he couldn't muster the courage to reveal that he was conscious _now,_ when they'd already started talking. Instead he did his best to keep his breathing soft and even.

 

"I should apologize to Ruby." His eyes flew open again, and he had to force himself to relax before he gave himself away. The argument was still fresh in his mind—every word of it had driven his thoughts into tighter and tighter circles until he'd sunk into sullen acceptance. _We can't just give up, huh?_ he thought ruefully. _Watch me._

 

"I'm sure she's already forgiven you," Schnee said, and there was something in her voice that made him imagine a funny little half-smile on her face. He couldn't be sure, though, not when he was facing the wall. That was a shame—the mental image reminded him of Dove, and the rare grins he could sometimes coax out of his partner.

 

Belladonna was quiet for a moment, before she spoke again. "Still," she murmured, listlessly.

 

"You weren't wrong."

 

"Doesn't matter."

 

There was a pause. Part of Sky hoped they were done, and that Schnee would fall asleep and Belladonna would go back to keeping watch. Another part of him was intensely curious.

 

The silence didn't last long.

 

"You know," Schnee began, "My father always talked about the family legacy." Sky winced—he _so_ should not be hearing this.

 

When Belladonna answered, she sounded even more uncomfortable than he was. "That makes sense, I guess."

 

Schnee laughed—quietly, so as not to wake the others. "I didn't take it the way he wanted me to, I don't think. I was being serious when I said I wanted to change what he's doing with the company." She stopped, and for a moment all Sky could hear was his own ragged breathing. "I don't know if it matters, now."

 

"It will help a lot of people," Belladonna assured her. Sky heard a shuffle of fabric from behind him, and clamped down on the impulse to turn around. What were they _doing,_ anyway?! They knew he wasn't asleep before, and here they were having a heart-to-heart not fifteen feet away and he couldn't _leave._ It was far too late to speak up now, especially when either one of them could probably bounce him off the ceiling half a dozen times before Dove woke up enough to help.

 

"I know that," Schnee sighed. "And it's a worthwhile goal, I'm not going to abandon it."

 

"But?"

 

"But... the way he talks, the way he's _always_ talked... he sees the company as something that will be there long after he's dead."

 

"That _is_ what legacy means," Belladonna teased, though even without looking at her face Sky could tell her heart wasn't totally in it.

 

"Ugh, what I'm _trying_ to say is that I thought it would be something I could do that would _last._ Even after I died, I would have accomplished something. But... well, you saw that cavern. If all those Grimm decided to attack Vale, we'd have no chance. They could wipe us off the planet at any time, it's just a matter of how long it takes them to figure that out."

 

Sky felt a bit like crying, at that. More out of frustration than anything else—this was what he was trying to _avoid_ thinking about, and the whole reason he'd started counting squares in the first place. If he'd just kept his damn mouth shut...

 

"Weiss," Belladonna mumbled. "I..." she trailed off, lapsing into a long silence.

 

"What?" Weiss prompted, after a moment.

 

"It's nothing."

 

He could almost picture the incredulous look on Weiss' face as she huffed. "If you're going to lie," she said, "you could at least _try_ to make it sound convincing."

 

Belladonna didn't respond for what felt like over a minute. When she did, she sounded resigned. "You should get some sleep."

 

"Blake—"

 

"Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

 

For a moment, Sky was sure Weiss was about to argue, but she just sighed and whispered, "Goodnight."

 

"'Night."

 

They both went silent, after that. Sky lay still for a long while, listening as Weiss' breathing evened out. Belladonna didn't make a sound as she stood—or sat—guard, and when she finally got up and roused the next watch, Sky was still staring sightlessly at the wall in front of him.

 

It was only after he heard Belladonna settling on the ground, and once he thought he'd waited long enough for her to be asleep, that he finally snuck a peek to see who the next watchman was. Lie was sitting a few yards away, legs bent in the classic meditation pose. His pink eyes scanned up and down the tunnel, calm and unperturbed. It was hard not to hate him a little bit for that.

 

At some point, Sky must have fallen asleep. He only knew it when he awoke again, covered in cold sweat and dried tears. His dreams had been dark and twisted, growing bone-plated limbs and spinning him up in black thread. He'd been able to move, but the fear had paralyzed him as easily as the Spider's venom from the day before. So he'd lain there and let the world be trussed up in a neat, oily cocoon—like a coward.

 

He sat up groggily, rubbing his eyes. They burned from tiredness, but he knew he wouldn't be going back to sleep anytime soon. His mind was sharp and alert, the back of his neck tingling from half-remembered terror. When he looked around, he noticed that Ruby had changed positions. She was now curled up beside her sister, who had thrown one arm around her waist—the one with the Spider bite on the bicep. Her expression was totally relaxed. Yang, too, slept peacefully.

 

Sky got to his feet, fingers twitching with nervous energy. He wanted... he wanted a bed so that he could crawl under the covers. He wanted a warm mug of tea and a hearth to sit beside. He wanted his mother.

 

Biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, he cast his eye around the rest of their camp. Lie was still keeping watch. The boy glanced at him inquisitively, then returned his attention to the tunnels when Sky didn't say anything.

 

He stood that way until his knees shook with exhaustion. Then he sat down until his back protested, and curled up on his side until his shoulder began to ache. Lie woke Nora, and lay on his back. He was out like a light in minutes, and Sky pretended to sleep so that he wouldn't have to talk to the crazed bomber-girl.

 

Nora grew bored quickly, and started tapping out an uneven rhythm with her forefinger on the stone. Sky counted squares again, firmly in his head this time. He was fairly sure she hadn't waited as long as she was supposed to when she clapped her hands together and called, "Everybody up!"

 

Belladonna jerked to a sitting position in an instant, amber eyes snapping open. There were bags under them, ones he was fairly sure hadn't been as prominent the day before. The rest took a lot longer to rise, but within a few minutes they were all standing in a ragged circle in the center of the tunnel.

 

"Wow," Yang groaned, as soon as she was upright. "This stuff really, really sucks."

 

Sky could feel it too—a certain stiffness in his joints, a slowness in his movements. A good way to die, if they had to fight again. Though... he honestly wasn't sure how much of that was the venom and how much was just exhaustion.

 

Rubbing at his aching temples, he fell in beside Dove. Their team had ended up in the back again—JNPR was leading, and of course RWBY didn't want to be separated from their friends. It was a familiar pattern, and Sky was mostly just glad he wasn't near the front.

 

They had a scare when Nora's scroll died a few hours into the 'morning,' but Dove was quick to retrieve his own from his pocket. After that, monotony began to sap away what was left of Sky's awareness. It took of his focus to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to avoid tripping and falling flat on his face. His halberd hung loosely from his hand, with the butt of it occasionally scraping the floor. Every time it happened, Belladonna would turn around and _glare_ at him, and he'd wince and hoist the weapon up. _I bet it'd suck to be her with a hangover._

 

At least Sky wasn't the only walking zombie. Russ took to muttering quiet curses under his breath—fine motor control was still somewhat beyond him, though he was getting better. Belladonna managed to move gracefully, but the few times she glanced over her shoulder to check behind them, Sky noticed her gaze was distant and unfocused.

 

He was hungry, too. It had been, what... a day? Twelve hours? Forty-eight? Sky had no idea, but the last thing he'd eaten had been about a quarter of a can of baked beans that had _not,_ in the end, been heated. It had been rubbery and slimy and lukewarm, and he'd eaten every damned bite because his whole body had been screaming for nourishment. The thought of it made his stomach twist into an uncomfortable knot.

 

_Keep moving,_ he thought. It was the only way they'd get out, and _that_ was the only way they'd find food again. If they were lucky, one of them would manage to kill some local animal and... well, he supposed they couldn't make a fire as it was now. Schnee and Russ were both out of flame Dust, and the matches had been in Cardin's pack, not Dove's. Maybe they could sit Yang down in the middle of them, like a human campfire.

 

Sky was so caught up in his own daydreams—and drooling like Pavlov's dogs in a belfry—that he didn't register that something was wrong until he realized Dove had drawn his sword. He fumbled for his halberd, desperately wishing that once, just _once,_ they could fight something that _wasn't_ a Spider.

 

A distant scraping sound was coming from behind them, towards the oily black heart of the caves. _Unless it's not the heart, and it's just the liver or something and the_ real _heart is somewhere down there, an ocean of dark slime ready to hatch..._ But whatever was making the noise, it wouldn't be a Spider. Or it probably wasn't a Spider, because Belladonna looked tense but not overtly terrified. He'd begun to suspect that, despite her unflappable demeanor, she _really_ didn't like those things—she _did_ seem to be the sane one on her team. And then it definitely wasn't a Spider, because he could hear howls and snarls and make out vaguely bipedal shapes.

 

"Beowolves," Belladonna confirmed. The Grimm emerged from the dark like shadows. They attacked team RWBY first, meeting messy ends as they were sliced to bits or poked full of holes or slashed to pieces—or _smashed,_ like overripe pumpkins. But gorier, obviously.

 

The twelve of them had fought more than this just the other day, before they found the cave. It had been effortless then, even _Sky_ hadn't been particularly worried, not when he could hear Nora laughing like the madwoman she most _definitely_ was and Dove's gunshots ringing in his ears. But now, they were struggling. The monsters broke through their first line of defense, ducking under a clumsy swing of Ruby's scythe and slipping between Belladonna and Yang. One particularly daring Beowolf leapt right over Schnee's head, landing on Jaune's shield with the force of a runaway truck and bowling him over. Nikos was there in an instant, burying her lance in the monster's back. Her weapon shifted even as she withdrew it, and within seconds she was firing a rifle into the press. But there were a lot of them now, and Yang ended up backed into a corner and suddenly JNPR was the front line, such as it was, and team RWBY were all in their own little pockets within the mass of Grimm.

 

They slipped through even faster this time around. Ammunition was becoming an issue, and Nikos had to switch back to melee. Lie in particular was almost out of bullets and relied on slashing at the monsters with his bladed guns, ignoring ranged combat altogether. Nora hadn't been able to use her grenades from the start for incredibly obvious reasons that had still taken a solid ten minutes to explain to her, until Lie had summed it up in a sentence. She was happily swinging her massive hammer around, but it just wasn't _enough,_ and then one of the Beowolves dove past Jaune and ended up right in Sky's face.

 

He flailed, forgetting all his training as instinct took over. The beast batted his halberd away almost contemptuously. Then it slashed at his chest, its claws bouncing off his armor as he resorted to punching it in the nose to try and gain some distance. It snarled, flecks of saliva landing on Sky's face as he whimpered and quailed. His spine melted before its deep red eyes, and he backed away a step.

 

Then Dove was there, wielding his sword in one hand and trying to keep his scroll's flashlight pointed at the others at the same time. With all the Grimm in the way, he probably had only moderate success—but he waded through the Grimm and neatly executed the monster that had been about to tear Sky's throat out.

 

Cardin was having almost as much trouble as Sky. One Beowolf grabbed the shaft of his mace in its mouth and yanked on it, trying to tear it from his grasp. Russel rushed towards him, slashing at the monster's mask, only to be cut off by another Grimm.

 

_This is ridiculous,_ Sky thought. _We had a bottleneck, this should be easy!_

 

But he could see why it wasn't. They were too hungry, too tired. His strikes were clumsy and slow, and he was missing more often than not. He wasn't any use like this.

 

"Dove!" he called out. "Pass me the light!" His partner nodded, pushing his scroll into Sky's hands. He did his best to angle it so that it was higher up and could shine through the press. Then, Yang caught fire again, and the whole thing was made rather a lot easier. She knocked back one of the Grimm with a _bang,_ using another precious bullet to blast the monster into the wall. It collapsed with a whine, and began to dissolve.

 

The tide of the battle turned slowly, but eventually all that remained was a single Ursa, grumpily trying to bash Jaune over the head. He was holding up his shield, which rang like a bell every time the monster's paw crashed down on it. Then, he lunged with his other hand and buried his sword halfway to the hilt in its stomach. It swayed, and would have fallen on him if Nikos hadn't pulled him out of the way.

 

They were all left standing in the tunnel, breathing hard. Grimm smoke hung thick in the air, and was sweeping past them like an evil breeze on its way back to the putrid lake. Sky imagined another Beowolf heaving its way out of the oily slime, shaking itself off and padding over to the same cave entrance. Eventually, it'd meet them again.

 

"Okay," Ruby panted. "Let's keep going."

 

Sky nodded, and nearly walked into a wall. Dove caught him by the arm and righted him, but he too was swaying on his feet. Even Cardin, who was built like an ox and generally had the endurance to match, staggered as he moved.

 

"When we get out of here," Dove whispered to Sky, "I am going to eat my weight in chocolate."

 

"I think I'll go for real food, instead," Sky murmured back. Just the thought of so much sugar made his stomach roil, but he could almost _smell_ the fresh baguettes the cafeteria always served. His mouth watered, and he tried to focus on the cave around him. There was no point torturing himself.

 

"I wonder if they're looking for us," Russel mused, into an uneasy silence.

 

"Probably," Yang replied. "I mean, we've been gone for what, a couple days now?"

 

Sky bent down to check Dove's scroll. "Yep. It's about three in the morning."

 

"I don't suppose we have any kind of signal, do we?" the Schnee asked.

 

He fiddled with the device for a moment, the light bouncing up and down as he walked. "Nope," he confirmed, switching it back to airplane mode to conserve battery. No one seemed particularly surprised.

 

Russel ran a hand through his hair with a groan. "Damn it," he grunted.

 

"Hey," Dove interjected, smiling in a way that was more awkward than reassuring. "We'll be alright."

 

"I doubt that," Cardin muttered under his breath.

 

"We can't afford to give up," Jaune said, crossing his arms and standing up straighter. "We're already on our way to the surface!"

 

"But what _then?"_ Sky found himself asking, _pleading._ "We just go back to normal and ignore the fact that life as we know it depends on a horde of Grimm being too dumb to attack us all together?"

 

"Okay, so it's looking pretty bad right now," Jaune conceded. "But I'm sure we can find a solution. It's not just us, you know? There's a whole world of brilliant people out there, someone will figure it out!"

 

"How?" Belladonna snapped, suddenly far more animated than she had been all morning. "How are we supposed to fight a _location_ where that smoke congregates, especially when there are probably more places like this on other continents?"

 

"We find them." Ruby stepped up to stand by Jaune. "We find them, and we... I don't know, block them up or something. Maybe we post hunters there to kill them before they spawn."

 

"There were _millions_ of those things, Ruby," Weiss said gently. "Even if we pooled together all the hunters in the world... it's not enough."

 

"So we don't know how, yet! That doesn't make it impossible!" Dove insisted. Sky turned toward his partner in surprise, feeling a flicker of hope somewhere in his gut.

 

"Yeah!" Ruby bounced up and down where she stood, fist raised in the air. "I mean, imagine how the first people must have felt, before they discovered Dust. They would've thought they were doomed, and now look at us! We have four whole kingdoms full of people that can live in peace!" Her eyes shone silver as they reflected the light of the scroll in his hand. He'd unconsciously given her a spotlight, though part of him wanted to turn it off. Let the dark fall in.

 

_Four kingdoms,_ he thought, _four kingdoms that nearly destroyed themselves only a century ago._ Beacon Academy students always did neglect their history lessons.

 

"We'll be okay." Jaune grinned at them. "This place must've been here for centuries. If they haven't overwhelmed us already, they probably can't!"

 

"Hunting has always been a dangerous profession," Nikos added. Sky's head snapped toward her, surprise flitting across his face. She'd seemed nearly as despondent as Belladonna, earlier. "We can't give up. This is the life we chose—to fight monsters, even if they frighten us. Even if we have our doubts."

 

"It's like Beacon!" Jaune stepped forward, laying his hand on his partner's shoulder. "The name of our school literally means a light in the darkness. It's there to create hope, even if things seem impossible!"

 

"Yeah!" Ruby, too, was staring out at the rest of them, as though she could lift them up out of despair through sheer will. "Our job is the same! We're here to protect people, and even if the world seems unfair or the fight seems unwinnable... we can make it better!"

 

"We have to believe that there's a chance." Sky met Dove's gaze and took in the determined set of his jaw. "If we have hope, we can do this!"

 

****

 

 

Cardin snarled, and slammed his hand against the wall with a _crack_. Sky jumped, but his leader only turned and stalked off. He stopped a few yards away, where the light faded into darkness. As they walked, he stayed at the front of the group, as far from anyone else as he could get. Russel jogged up to join him, but Sky couldn't muster the courage. He just stayed where he was in the column, illuminating the back of the boy's armor.

 

His eyes were smarting again, so he turned his head to stare at the tunnel wall. He didn't really want to—it was crawling with strange shadows, and even though he held the light he couldn't seem to point it at the right angle to make them go away. It was better than knowing someone else could see his face, though.

 

Beacon was a school for heroes. He'd known that, intellectually. That's what he'd been hoping for, a place that could teach him how to be one himself. But it had never been as apparent as right now, when four of his classmates were walking down the middle of a dark cave teeming with Grimm, brazenly proclaiming that everything would be fine.

 

Part of him wanted to be annoyed—it was as though reality had left the building. Tunnel. Whatever. Part of him was ashamed. He'd always been a bit of a pessimist, he supposed, though it had never mattered that much. Maybe he saw the glass as half-empty, but that didn't mean he didn't have the brains to get a damn refill. Now, though... his classmates were trying to inspire one another, and he could see it working—Jaune and Ruby in particular seemed like they'd been lit up from the inside. Yang and the Schnee were both walking straighter, watching the byplay with half-smiles on their faces. And Lie and Nora... Sky wondered if they even cared at all. He hadn't seen her manic grin slip once since they'd first seen that cavern. At first he'd thought she was faking it, but no. She really was happy, even now.

 

Sky plodded on, head down. Once, Dove nudged his shoulder to get him to point the scroll the right way. Jaune suggested, very kindly, that maybe they should have two lights out so that they could watch both the front and back of the tunnel. Sky flushed.

 

Hours passed, though they were mostly a blur to him. Dove scroll flickered out, which left Jaune with the only light. There weren't any Grimm, or at least none that constituted serious threats. A lone Beowolf came sniffing around them, only to take Nikos' lance to the throat before it fully comprehended that they were there in the first place. Sky could almost sympathize with the dumbfounded look on it's face. That didn't quite erase the effect of its jagged bone mask, or the inch-long fangs he could see gleaming inside its mouth. The smoke it made as it dissolved brushed past him, and he wrinkled his nose in revulsion.

 

Then, at last, they stopped for a rest. Russel flopped to the ground without preamble, muttering something highly uncomplimentary—about what, Sky honestly had no idea—and curled up on his side. Everyone else sat down a bit more carefully and began making themselves comfortable. Quiet talking filled the cave, and people broke off into their own friend groups. Which was to say, team CRDL and everyone else. As soon as the others' attention was absorbed by conversation, Sky elbowed Dove and jerked his head toward the passage ahead.

 

"Maybe someone should keep a lookout on the tunnel," he suggested. Dove frowned, then nodded. They seated themselves close enough to the rest of the group that they could see the dim glow of Jaune's scroll, left glowing in the middle of their 'camp'. Dove took up a strange position halfway between a lotus and a pretzel, with one foot resting on his thigh and the other tucked away beneath his leg. He always sat like that when he was nervous.

 

"Can we talk?" he asked, in a slightly more hushed tone than usual. Sky nodded.

 

"What about?"

 

It was an open-ended question, and one that always thrilled him. He'd never been very talkative in the years before Beacon, mostly because he was a terrified child and the rest of his class were mainly assholes. That hadn't changed, not really, but he'd had the blind dumb luck—unless he was right and Ozpin _had_ fucked with the launch pads—to run into Dove. The two of them had been sneaking off to the library for months, nominally to study. Really, it was to get away from their roommates and have a conversation.

 

Some of the best moments of Sky's relatively short life had taken place at one particular table, nestled in the shadows. Dove, who seemed far more animated there than anywhere else, had leapt at the chance to talk about anything and everything. It was there that Sky had discovered, to his delighted surprise, that his partner—his stone-faced, straight-laced, stick-up-the-ass partner—was a _giant nerd._

 

Belladonna had caught them at it, once. Sky had looked up halfway through a laugh that had left him wheezing—hearing Dove make a chemistry pun was like watching a river catch fire, it just didn't _happen,_ and the embarrassed look on his face only made it better—and he'd met a pair of bright yellow eyes staring at them, half-hidden behind a bookshelf. He'd started coughing like he was hacking up a lung, and then Dove had turned around and gone a shade of scarlet that would make a traffic light jealous. She'd run off, and never mentioned it again.

 

Still, something told Sky that he wasn't going to enjoy this particular conversation. Dove wasn't meeting his eyes—it was sort of hard to tell, but his nose was pointed somewhere over Sky's shoulder and that probably wasn't a great sign.

 

"You seem... upset." Sky resisted the urge to groan. Dove, as he'd come to understand, could be a bit of a mess when it came to personal conversations. Seeing as this was one he'd rather get over with as soon as possible, he just shrugged.

 

"I am. Aren't you?"

 

"I was." Dove scowled. "Cardin's being an ass."

 

"When isn't he?" Sky regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. They were bitter, more so than he'd expected. His leader could be a bit... caustic, but he'd liked the guy at some point. Something about his blunt, no-nonsense attitude had been funny. Since the Breach, though, Cardin's temper had gone from foul to downright apocalyptic. Sky tried not to be in the dorm alone.

 

There was an excruciating silence, before Dove cleared his throat. "I just... I want to help."

 

"With Cardin?"

 

Dove shook his head. "No, with... all this. What Belladonna said."

 

"You mean the Grimm not dying, and all of us being screwed?" He'd been aiming for a jovial, sarcastic kind of tone, but his voice cracked halfway through.

 

"I don't think we are," Dove insisted. "I really believe we can do this. Or if not us, someone else. We have centuries until we run out of Dust, that's plenty of time for someone to come up with a plan."

 

Lowering his eyes, Sky began picking at the dolphin grey enamel on his greaves. It was smooth, and cool to the touch. "I know," he mumbled. He knew Dove thought that, anyway, and he couldn't bring himself to argue. They'd had debates a bit like this before, though it had always seemed like a far-off concept at the time.  


Dove believed in an afterlife, and Sky didn't. They stopped talking about it after it became clear that they wouldn't agree. Instead they retreated to other, safer topics, and it eventually became something they could bring up in passing. Something to laugh about. Dove would jokingly tell him he was a cynical bastard, and Sky would smile and call him a bloody optimist.

 

This was... a bit different. The idea of nothing, even after they died, was scary in a distant sort of way. His brain couldn't wrap around it. But the thought of hordes of Grimm cresting over the mountains around Vale like a tide of red eyes and teeth? _That_ was all too easy to imagine. What would he do? There'd be nowhere left to hide.

 

"You don't, do you?" The question startled Sky out of his thoughts, and he found his partner fixing him with a strange look. Slowly, he shook his head. Dove sighed. "I can tell it's eating away at you."

 

Sky grinned weakly. "Yeah, well, finding out life as we know it might vanish like socks in a dryer tends to be a bit of a downer."

 

Dove's mouth twitched, possibly at the odd metaphor—Sky had discovered early that they were one of the easiest ways to get him to crack a smile. "It doesn't have to be like that, you know."

  
Ducking his head, Sky began fiddling with his greaves again. This was sounding remarkably similar to their last discussion on theology, but it felt a lot more... heavy. Like it mattered what they decided, beyond whether they felt a warm, communal spirit in the pews of churches or just a deep-seated awkwardness and desire for coffee and snacks.

 

"I can't," he murmured, curling his knees up in front of him and hugging them to his chest.

 

"Can't what?"

 

"I can't just _believe_ something." His chin fell to rest on his knees with a thump. "Even when I want to."

 

"Sky..." Dove shifted uncomfortable, shooting Sky a pained look. "Just because we can't think of something _now,_ doesn't mean it can't happen."

 

Sky laughed, though the sound came out harsh and strangled and maybe a little bit hysterical. "I _can_ think of a solution, actually. We all get the fuck out of here and set up shop on another planet."

 

Dove grinned. "See? It's not so bad, right?"

 

"Except that Dust doesn't work off-planet," Sky snapped. "It just _doesn't,_ there's no way we could do it."

 

"You can't know that—"

  
"And neither can you!" Sky jerked to his feet and began pacing agitatedly back and forth. "Everyone keeps talking like it's obvious, like of _course_ we'll figure something out, but we have _no idea._ All we _know_ is that all the Grimm we've killed down here are probably already crawling out of that lake and getting ready for round two!"

 

"That doesn't mean it's over," Dove insisted. "Humanity is stubborn, right? We've always had to struggle to survive as a species. Nothing's _changed—_ it's like Jaune said, that lake's probably been there forever, and we haven't died yet. We don't have to be afraid of it."

 

"Maybe _you_ don't," Sky whispered, slumping sideways until he was leaning against the rough stone wall of the cave. "But I do. I'm a fucking _coward.”_ His voice cracked, and he had to swallow back tears. Then he remembered that it was Dove, who had seen him crying over his pitiful combat record, over four page papers during midterms, over _Cardin.._. and decided to let them fall.

 

"That's not what I meant." Dove stood up, then. Sky stared at the ground.

 

"I know," he groaned. "I _know,_ but it's how it is _._ The whole reason I even came to Beacon was to grow a pair, and now... I can't _sleep._ I was up all last night, the only time I conked out I had a nightmare and I just..." Sky rested his hands on the wall, suddenly dizzy. "I always thought Vale was safe, you know? Even though villages disappear all the time, the city would still be there. And maybe there's crime, and places you don't want to wander around at night, but... I could hang out in some café somewhere, and it would be _safe."_

 

"It still is," his partner murmured. "Nothing's changed, except now we know a little more about the Grimm."

 

"Yes, it _has."_ Sky let his forehead touch the stone, cooling it. He was sweating, and his hair clung to him like a second skin. "Because now I know all it would take... all it would take is for them to notice a fucking metropolis full of millions of people! We're only, what, a few dozen miles from the city itself?"

 

"Thirty-seven," Dove replied, grimacing.

 

Sky laughed again. This time, it was definitely hysterical. "So now, every time I think I'm safe, every time I lie down in my nice soft bed, I'll _know._ I'll know that the Grimm are just thirty-seven miles away from overwhelming Vale, and maybe the other kingdoms too. The world as we know it could end at _any minute."_

 

Dove sighed. "I'm sorry," he mumbled.

 

"Why?" Sky flopped to the ground, too drained to stay upright. "It's not like you built this place."

 

"I'm sorry I can't make you feel better."

 

Sky tried to grin, but it wouldn't come. "Yeah, well..." he trailed off, unsure of how to end his own sentence. Maybe he could lie, say he _did_ believe in humanity's destiny after all, but Dove would see right through it and besides, he just couldn't muster the energy. Then there was a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up so abruptly that his neck twinged. Dove was sitting next to him. He patted Sky's on the back twice, then stood up again.

 

"I've heard that's supposed to help," he explained. Sky stared at him. It had been intensely awkward, if he were honest, but considering how much Dove hated touching people like that...

 

"Thank you," he said. This time, he managed a watery smile.


	8. Buying Time

 

The second they stopped, Blake was surrounded.

 

Ruby and Yang bracketed her left and right, with Weiss settling in on Ruby's other side. Team JNPR was arrayed in front of them, sitting cross-legged or, in Nora's case, lying on her stomach. And, of course, they were talking. It was all very sweet, and friendly, and well-meant, and it made her want to _scream._

 

She caught herself brooding—she wanted to claim she was 'lost in thought' or 'pensive,' but she was already dodging around the word 'sulking' so brooding would have to do. If the others noticed, and she was fairly sure Yang had, they didn't force her into the conversation. She let it wash over her. The words were hard to pick apart, and she was so exhausted...

 

"What do you think?" Yang asked, gently nudging her side. Blake stared at her for a moment, suddenly and powerfully reminded of being asked the same thing in Doctor Oobleck's class. "Yes," she guessed.

 

Judging by the odd looks from her friends, this was the wrong answer. She curled into herself a little. "Um, What was the question?"

 

Yang pointed at Nora, who was standing on her hands. Judging by the way her arms were shaking, she'd been doing it a while. "Oh. Nice."

 

Concerned looks were exchanged, but no one said anything. Instead Nora flipped back on to her feet, folded her arms across her chest, and stuck out her tongue. Then she flopped to the floor and went right back to whatever conversation they'd been having that had led to her doing a handstand in the first place. At least, Blake _assumed_ it was the same conversation—for all she knew, they'd been speaking in tongues until just now. This time, she made a bit more of an effort to pay attention.

"What do you want to do first, when we get out of here?" Jaune asked the group at large.

 

Blake didn't know. What _were_ they supposed to do, when the immediate life-or-death situation resolved itself? They'd have to go to Ozpin, wouldn't they, and tell him about the lake. Maybe he'd know what to do... but he wasn't a god. She couldn't see _how_ he'd be able to block off the cave.

 

Of course they'd go to him... but would _she?_ Should she tell him of her own private suspicions, or trust him to come to the same conclusion on his own if it were accurate? She wasn't sure she could say it out loud—it was hard to think it. _We're probably livestock..._

 

"We should have a team day out, or something," Yang suggested. Blake jumped, startled out of her thoughts by her partner's voice. "Maybe go to Vale, and... I don't know, usually when we do that something explodes."

 

"When we go with you guys, sure," Jaune smirked. "Team Juniper has had _plenty_ of successful outings, thank you very much!"

 

"Successful?" Ren repeated, raising an eyebrow. "We were kicked out of the arcade."

 

"One time!" Jaune groaned.

 

"Twice, actually," Pyrrha corrected him apologetically.

 

"Let's make it three!" Nora cheered, pumping her fist. She furrowed her brow. "Thrice?"

 

"I'll pass," Weiss said flatly. "The second I get back to Becaon, I am headed straight to our room and going to bed. Hopefully for at least a week."

 

"Yeah," Ruby agreed. "Sleep sounds really nice... but like, on a mattress, not..." she gestured at the ground and made a face.

 

"How 'bout you?" Yang asked Blake, a bit hesitantly. She mustered a smile.

 

"We should probably talk to Ozpin. And get food. Definitely not in that order."

 

Ruby giggled. "I vote we make Ren cook."

 

Ren put both of his hands up, fingers spread and palms facing outward. The others all stared at him in confusion before Nora elaborated. "Ten minutes. It's the rule—if he's hungry, he doesn't make anything that takes longer than that."

 

"So... break into the cafeteria?" Yang suggested.

 

"That's assuming we get back in the middle of the night," Weiss pointed out. "Not to mention the fact that they'll probably let us in anyway, since we've been out on a mission for days with only enough food for one meal."

 

"I'm just glad Dove kept his pack." Jaune rubbed the back of his head nervously. "That could've been bad."

 

"Not as bad as being eaten by a giant spider, though," Nora said cheerfully.

 

"Few things are, Nora," Ren sighed.

 

"Well, there's always being eaten by an Ursa, being eaten by a Beowolf—that'd just be _embarrassing—_ being eaten by a Nevermore—"

 

"Right," Jaune groaned. "Thanks for that."

 

"I still say the giant spider would be worse," Ruby mused. "Those things are creepy. Did you see the way they moved?" She began crawling her hand along the ground, as if to demonstrate.

 

Weiss made a face. "Please don't."

 

"Not a fan of spiders, huh?" Yang teased.

 

"Not when they're taller than me, _no."_

 

"I hate them," Jaune confessed. "Too many legs, you know?"

 

"Even the little ones?" Ruby asked.

 

"Pfft, nah..."

 

"He keeps making us kill them," Nora stage-whispered. "Except Ren likes to rescue them and put them in the hallway."

 

"Where they inevitably end up in our room," Weiss finished, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. "Thank you _so_ much, Ren."

 

He shrugged. "They're harmless. And they eat mosquitoes."

 

 _Harmless._ Blake snorted. The regular variety, maybe, but she couldn't help thinking of the Grimm they'd been fighting recently—the way they moved in near-perfect silence, despite being absolutely massive. Their venom, and how it made its victims look almost dead. That had been her first thought, when Ren had finally gotten his scroll out. Everyone was just _lying_ there...

 

Her ear pinned itself against the stone wall behind her, and she winced as her fur caught on the rough surface. She pitched forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

 

"I think I know what I want to do, when I get back to Beacon," Pyrrha decided. "I'm going to tidy up the dorm. No more cluttered corners for spiders to hide in. I do _not_ want them crawling around on the ceiling while I sleep."

 

"Lame," Nora decided. "I refuse to clean. We'll make the peons do it."

 

"What peons, Nora?" asked Ren. There was a hint of nervousness in his voice—probably because the answer to his question could easily be, 'Look in the mirror!'

 

Instead, Nora's eyes rolled sideways towards where Russel and Cardin were sitting, talking quietly amongst themselves. Blake managed the ghost of a smirk at that.

 

"Nora!" Ren tried to scold her, but it was obvious he was suppressing a laugh.

 

"I might join you," Weiss mused. "Though the ant population will probably explode the second I do. _Some_ people seem to think they can just leave food lying around." She shot an irritated glare at Ruby and Yang. Their nervous grins were almost identical. That was, until something seemed to occur to Ruby.

 

"Aw, are spiders killing the poor ants?" she asked, sounding genuinely distressed.

 

"Really?" Weiss put a palm over her face. "It's worse than I thought. She's feeding them _on purpose._ Like a crazy pigeon lady, but with insects."

 

"Nuh-uh!" Ruby denied frantically. "I just... well, I can kinda sympathize with the whole not wanting to get eaten by spiders thing now."

 

Weiss seemed to absorb that for a moment. Her face turned a few shades whiter than normal. "Oh, _wonderful._ Now I'm remembering how real spiders eat."

 

"Please do _not_ share with the class," Yang said hurriedly. "I am blissful in my ignorance, thanks." Jaune, who looked like he might be about to throw up, nodded eagerly.

 

"Right!" Nora blurted. "Someone say something they want to do when they get back, 'cause I really don't wanna think about spiders anymore."

 

"Ooh!" Ruby blurted, sitting up straight. "I heard they're opening a new theater in Vale, near where the Beacon airship lands. And, I mean, it's sort of obvious they're trying to get students to come, so they'll probably show a lot of action movies and stuff. We could go!"

 

Their was a chorus of agreement—Blake made sure to grunt something affirmative. She'd end up getting dragged along anyway, there was no point arguing.

 

No point. That seemed to be something of a theme for her, lately. She couldn't remember ever being as terrified as she had been yesterday, when the light had gone out. For the first time in her life, she'd been completely blind. There had been noise, but she couldn't put it together into a coherent picture, couldn't figure out where the Grimm were or shoot without hitting her friends. She'd been helpless.

 

How did spiders eat, anyway? She remembered that it was extremely unpleasant, though she'd learned it a long time ago. It must have been back with her parents, when she spent a lot of her time in libraries browsing the shelves. Sometimes she ran out of fantasy or adventure books, and ended up paging through the nonfiction. It came back to her all at once—the slightly-musty smell of all those books, the coffee the librarian drank, the faint whirring of computer terminals in the background, all carrying a long-lost sense of peace and safety.

 

It seemed so flimsy, now. The only reason places like that still existed, the only reason they were built in the first place, was that the Grimm hadn't overrun Menagerie. Hadn't overrun Remnant. _Why? Why haven't they killed us?_

 

"Blake?"

 

She jolted back to awareness. Yang was looking at her, clearly concerned.

 

"What?" she blurted, looking wildly around for the reason her name had been called. She realized JNPR wasn't sitting next to them, anymore. They'd each ended up in their own little clumps, and all of her teammates were staring.

 

"Are you sure you're okay?" her partner asked. She nodded almost reflexively.

 

"What were we talking about?" Then, when they started looking even _more_ worried, "I'm fine. I just... tuned out for a moment."

 

"We were wondering about what to do, going forward," Weiss replied. Her tone suggested that it was a much more serious discussion than the one they'd been having with JNPR.

 

Yang sighed, leaning back against the cave wall. "I want to figure out what to think about that lake, you know? It's gonna bother me until I do."

 

Ruby frowned. "As in... how we might stop it?"

 

Shooting an apologetic glance her way, Yang shook her head. "I mean, what we do now. Even if, hypothetically... we can't."

 

"Hypothetically?" Blake asked, searching Yang's expression. She seemed... pensive. Lost in thought, but not despairing.

 

"Well, I'm not sure. I guess there could be something, it's not like I'm all-knowing or anything, but... it seems kind of _definite."_

 

"That doesn't mean there's nothing we can do!" Ruby insisted.

 

Heaving another sigh, Yang flopped over onto her back, kicking up her legs against the wall. It was almost as though she was relaxing in their dorm—in, of course, the strangest position she could manage. "I know that," she said finally. "I mean more... more of a what-if. You know, what if it really is inevitable? What do we do then?"

 

Weiss nodded. It wasn't an affirmative gesture, exactly, more like she was gathering her thoughts. "I wondered about that, too."

 

"What do you think?" Yang's eyes grew unusually intense, though the expression looked more silly than anything else upside-down.

"I don't know," Weiss admitted, frowning. "I want to leave something behind, even after I die. I hate the idea of everything I've done amounting to nothing in the end. It... makes me angry. I'd want to hurt them back."

 

"That seems kinda... dark," Ruby murmured, hugging her knees to her chest.

 

"Well, we _are_ talking about the hypothetical end of the world," Yang said lightly. "And... yeah, I think I'd want to be fighting, too. I don't know if I like the idea of that being all there is to it, though."

 

"Obviously not." Rolling her eyes, Weiss finally looked down at where Yang was lying, trying and failing to hide a smirk at the odd pose. "I'd also prefer to live as long as I can, thank you very much."

 

"This is probably the wrong line of work for that," Blake pointed out. Weiss snorted.

 

Yang shuffled around a bit, until she was once again in a mostly normal sitting position. Well, apart from the fact that one of her boots was in Ruby's lap. "I just... I feel like there should be something _to_ it. Fighting back, I mean. Like we should be getting something out of it."

 

"Maybe we are." She looked up, startled. It had been Pyrrha who'd spoken—she'd swiveled around so that she was facing them rather than the rest of her team, and there was a thoughtful, almost melancholy expression on her face that Blake had never seen before. "I think a fight can still be worthwhile, even if it ultimately can't hold back the tide."

 

Yang perked up, running a hand through her hair and nodding. "I still want to help people."

 

"So do I," Blake agreed. She curled her legs up under her, focusing mostly on the backs of her hands as she spoke. "I just can't help but feel like we're just... buying time."

 

"Buying time," Yang repeated, sounding somewhat dazed. Then, a wide smile spread across her face. "Yeah! That's it exactly!"

 

"It is?" Blake raised an eyebrow. It had seemed to her like a cynical and fatalistic thing to say, not something that could be considered inspiring.

 

Yang nodded again, more vigorously this time. "I guess... I've heard a lot from dad and Uncle Qrow about protecting the people. It always sounded kind of vague, like I didn't know what I was actually _doing._ I knew there were Grimm attacking people, and they needed to be stopped, it just never really _connected,_ you know?" She grinned. "But what you said about buying time... I like the idea of fighting off the Grimm, so that people can have _moments._ 'Cause that's what buying time would be, isn't it? It's letting someone have another year or month, even just another day to do something like... I don't know, have a nice dinner with their parents or go on a date with someone they've been too scared to talk to. Those kinds of things. That seems like something I'd want to fight for."

 

Only then did Yang seem to realize that everyone else in their little group was staring at her. "What?" she blurted.

 

"Yang!" Ruby exclaimed, grabbing her sister in a hug. "That's awesome!"

 

Blake couldn't help but grin. It was very like her partner, to take the sudden revelation of dark forces that were impossible to destroy, that were lairing only fifty miles away from Vale... and somehow find the bright side. For one brief, absurd moment she almost felt that everything _would,_ despite all available evidence, be okay.

 

She knew the kinds of moments Yang was talking about—she could see them in her head, months' worth of snapshots of her life at Beacon, a blur of light and color that stuck out like a sore thumb among other, darker images.

 

The Grimm let her have that. If what she'd realized in the cavern was true, then everything that had ever happened to her, her very _existence,_ was dependent on the fact that they had decided not to wipe out humanity entirely. If she were to keep living for those golden moments, and she _wanted_ to, more than she'd ever wanted anything, that would depend on the monsters they understood so much less than they'd thought. It would depend on the Grimm deciding not to slaughter them... yet.

 

How could she just _ignore_ that? Ignore the fact that the creatures of darkness were fully capable of overwhelming all their defenses the moment they chose? Ignore how, as far as she could see, they were likely keeping people alive for their own purpose? Ignore the simmering suspicions in the back of her mind, each more vile than the next, of what that purpose might be?

 

 _Livestock._ That had been what she'd assumed. But Grimm didn't eat, as far as anyone could tell. Or, rather, they _did—_ they just didn't need to, not for survival. Was it all a game? The monsters seemed to take some kind of sick pleasure in ripping people apart. Perhaps all Hunters were really doing was playing right into their hands, serving themselves up on silver platters for the Grimm to pick them apart piece by piece.

 

Grimacing, she reaching up to rub her eyes. _No._ It didn't matter, it _didn't._ Whatever the Grimm were doing, they were _going_ to get out of this cave and then... well, then she could live her life. Whatever that meant.

 

Blake let her shoulders slump. She couldn't do this. Unconditional positivity always seemed to come so easily to her teammates—or, at least, to Ruby and Yang. Maybe Weiss wasn't taking everything quite so in stride as she seemed to be, or maybe it really was just Blake.

 

Her thoughts kept churning unstoppably. What if the Grimm weren't leaving people alive to toy with them? Maybe they simply didn't care. Humanity was just a nuisance, one they swatted away like a horde of persistent flies and, afterwards, thought about very little. That was worse, somehow. So much worse.

 

Maybe her breathing had hitched, or her distress had shown on her face. Either way, Yang shot Blake a concerned look. The message was obvious— _Are you okay?_ —but she just mustered a smile and nodded. She wanted to talk about this, she was starting to think she needed to. But this was tormenting her, and she shouldn't, she _wouldn't_ force it on her teammates as well. Not when they finally seemed to be recovering.

 

Instead, she forced herself to listen. Pyrrha had been talking, though the only piece of conversation she managed to comprehend was her last word, _comrades._ It was a nice word, though as completely out of context as it was, Blake felt next to nothing.

 

Weiss, who had been paying better attention, smiled. "I like the thought of fighting beside friends," she admitted.

 

"It definitely makes things feel more fun," Yang agreed cheerfully. "And less pointless."

 

Weiss shook her head in bemusement. "I wouldn't call it _fun,_ but it's far better than letting them win."

 

Nodding emphatically, Yang pumped her fist in the air. "Heck yeah! I'm gonna make it my personal mission to figure out a way to tie those stupid Spiders' legs in knots!"

 

"Exactly!" Weiss exhaled, and her expression sharpened. "If they're going to devour civilization as we know it," she declared, "then they'd better choke on it."

 

Blake barked out a startled laugh. "So... spite," she observed. Weiss flushed.

 

"Not _exactly,"_ she huffed. "I hate the idea of all this being _easy_ for them. Of everything we ever built just disappearing without a trace. So, if they're going to be all that's left... we leave a mark. On _them."_

 

Yang cracked her knuckles. "Sign me up!"

 

There was a bark of laughter, from somewhere behind them. Blake turned sharply, only to see Russel Thrush _of all people_ looking over at them. His shoulders were shaking with mirth, and his expression was something between admiring and exasperated.

 

"What?" Weiss snapped.

 

"You guys really are _crazy,"_ he decided. "Absolutely batshit, suicidal morons." There was a wry smile on his face, but Blake found that she was still annoyed.

 

"You're more than welcome to stay out of it," she pointed out, a little heat leeching into her voice.

 

Russel shook his head, still chuckling. "That wasn't an insult," he said. "That was... I don't even know. Inspirationally insane, I guess."

 

"Why, thank you," Weiss drawled, voice dripping with sarcasm.

 

He frowned at her. "What? Maybe I don't agree with you, but I can respect it."

 

"Respect." Pyrrha raised an eyebrow at him. "That doesn't seem like your strong suit."

 

"Nope!" He spread his arms and shrugged. "And it'll be a cold day in hell when I die for honor or pride or whatever."

 

By now, Jaune and the rest of team JNPR had also turned around and were shooting disapproving looks at Russel. He either didn't notice, or didn't care.

 

"Wanna know what I think?"

 

"No," Blake said instantly.

 

"Fuck it, right?" Russel gestured at the cave around them. "Why get ourselves killed to fight Grimm, when they don't even die? Better to live as well as we can, forget the rest of it. Enjoy what we have, or whatever."

 

"Does that mean you're not coming back to the academy next year?" Yang asked. "Because that'd be great."

 

"Of course I am," he snapped. Then he sighed. "Look, it's not like people become hunters because they want to live short painful lives. We all have our reasons for being here, and mine isn't conditional on me getting to save the world." And with that, he turned away again.

 

Blake scowled at him, but out of the corner of her eye she noticed that Ren was wearing a thoughtful expression. She turned to face him, and he smiled.

 

"He was rather rude," he said, "but I do agree with some of the sentiment." Then he blinked, apparently alarmed, as he suddenly received the entire group's undivided attention.

 

"How do you mean?" Jaune asked, frowning.

 

Ren paused, furrowing his brow. "Well... I don't personally think it matters that much, that the Grimm are undying."

 

"What?!" cried several voices at once, Blake among them. Ren smiled, raising his hands in a placating gesture.

 

"That is, I was always under the impression that humanity's continued existence on Remnant was... tenuous at best. Nothing lasts forever, after all. Now I know that the end might be nearer than I had thought, but we still have hundreds of years at least before we run out of Dust. I won't be alive then."

 

"So it just doesn't matter?" Ruby blurted, incredulous.

 

"I never said that. I only mean that... well, I see no reason to despair. If we can do something, we will do it—and if we can't, we will still live our lives."

 

Nora grinned. "Yeah! And if this means we have less time, we're just gonna have to be awesome enough to make up for it!"

 

"That's the spirit!" Yang cheered. Ruby reached across their little circle and high-fived Nora. Even Weiss was smiling, seemingly against her will.

 

Blake curled into herself. Her head and heart were both pounding, and for a moment she wanted to just blurt it out. Tell them what they were, what _everyone_ was, that the Grimm were leaving them alive. Then the urge passed, and she was left feeling sick and twisted.

 

For several minutes, her friends chatted animatedly about hope, courage, and the future. It sounded hollow and muted to her, and she was glad when they rose and recollected their things. Sky and Dove returned from their post further down the tunnel—though why they'd bothered was beyond her, since no one had been sleeping and a watch was entirely unnecessary. Then again, she'd seen Jaune and Pyrrha do something similar before—it was probably just a chance to have a somewhat private conversation.

 

As team RWBY passed the two 'watchmen,' Blake locked gazes with Sky, just for a second. He looked... well, terrible. There were deep, red-rimmed bags under his eyes, and what seemed like tear-tracks on his cheeks. His eyes were shadowed, his movements twitchy. It was clear he was reacting to their situation just as badly, if not worse, than Blake was. He wasn't like her team or JNPR—for him, the damage was already done. Something like an idea started forming in the back of her mind, but then the moment passed and she found herself meandering down the tunnel once again, staring listlessly into the darkness ahead.

 

They went on like that a long time, moving in silence. The cave narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again. It twisted left and right, growing steeper and then leveling off. Blake didn't even notice the first web, not until she blundered right into it. One minute she was walking—stumbling, really, the lack of sleep was starting to catch up with her—and the next there was something sticky in her eyes, blinding her.

 

For a moment she floundered, clawing uselessly at her face. Then there were steadying hands on her shoulders, and she managed to calm herself down. From there, it was just a matter of grabbing at the silk and pulling, anchoring it on her clothes so that she could get her hands free and repeat. Over and over, until her eyes were uncovered.

 

When she finally blinked the blurriness from her vision, she saw her partner hovering anxiously over her shoulder. Blake managed a shaky thumbs-up. There were a lot shocked and worried faces around her—apparently, the others hadn't seen the trap either. Though, that was probably because it was black silk against the dark background of the cave wall. _She_ should have been able to see it. Would have, if she hadn't been distracted.

 

Their group was reluctant to keep going, after that. They weren't dumb. They _knew_ there were Spiders up ahead, just as they knew they were going to get into another fight. Everything about this part of the tunnel screamed danger. Unfortunately, they didn't have a choice—this was the only way out.

 

It soon became clear that Yang, with her blunted gauntlets that were entirely incapable of slashing through silk, was not the best choice to lead. Weiss and Ruby pulled ahead of her and Blake, with the latter making quick work of every web that had the misfortune to cross her path.

 

Not even a quarter of an hour later—Blake guessed, it was hard to know for certain—Weiss tripped and would have fallen face-first into another bit of silk if Ruby hadn't intervened, grabbing hold of her partner by the elbow and hauling her upright. It took a moment to free her foot. This web was thicker than the one Blake had walked through earlier.

 

After that, little accidents became commonplace. Poor Jaune nearly hanged himself on a particularly dense patch of webbing after tripping down an incline, and had to be rescued by Ren. Nora made an ill-fated attempt to smash her way free when she stumbled into one of the silk-coated walls. Even team CRDL, who had all eight of their classmates ahead of them to find the more obvious traps, were often snagged and forced to cut one another loose.

 

It got to the point where the sudden feeling of arrested momentum became more tedious than terrifying. Her heart stopped beating in her throat every time she tripped. She no longer expected a Spider to come crawling out of every shadow, fangs poised to strike. The longer they walked, the less tense she became. The less tense she became, the more her body _ached_ with exhaustion and hunger. Blake had gone without food before, but once again, her time at Beacon had made her soft. She could barely think straight without being reminded over and over of the hollow pangs in her gut, and sometimes she tripped because she was struggling to stay awake rather than because she'd been snagged by the silk.

 

Her eyes drifted closed, and for a few steps she stumbled along, barely conscious. Then she opened them again, just in time to swerve around a curtain of dark web. As soon as she passed it, her eyelids started to droop again. She found herself half-dreaming that she was back at Beacon, drifting despondently back to their dorm after a grueling lecture in Port's class. She could almost hear his voice— _"Why, when I was a young man I never tripped over a web in my life, I wore high-heeled boots in order to—"_

 

Blake lurched, bumping into Yang as her knees buckled under her. Crying out in alarm, her partner grabbed her shoulders and steadied her. She snapped awake.

 

"You okay?" Yang asked, brow furrowing in concern. Blake nodded feverishly.

 

"Fine. Just tired."

 

"We're _all_ tired," Cardin snarled at her. "Let's get the fuck out of here already."

 

Yang turned on him, hair shimmering. The cavern wall behind her was bending and wavering in a small heat haze. Blake grabbed her arm. "Leave it," she mumbled.

 

Her head was pounding. A low clicking noise droned against the back of her skull, beating in time with her heart. She tried to rub the pain away, only to meet her forehead. Massaging at the space between her eyebrows did absolutely nothing—if anything, the noise felt _louder._

 

Blake looked up reflexively, her groggy mind registering that something wasn't right. There was nothing there, just folds of silk and rough grey stone. She shook herself, forcing her feet to move in the same general direction as Yang. Her partner was still livid, casting incandescent glares over her shoulder every other step. Cardin sneered defiantly at her from behind an exasperated Dove.

 

Frustrated, Blake tried to step between them. Her foot caught on an outcropping of stone, and she nearly fell flat on her face. It was only her innate balance that kept her upright, arms flying out to her sides to steady her as she swayed drunkenly back and forth. She felt almost as bad as she had about a month ago, when their entire team had pulled an all-nighter to study for an upcoming test. Blake suspected Weiss hadn't really needed to be up quite that late, but had stayed awake out of solidarity—that, or she'd decided she wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. Probably wise. One didn't mix Ruby and energy drinks and still expect a solid night's rest.

 

A half-smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she righted herself, wincing. Yang was still giving her that look, like she was expecting Blake to brain herself on the floor any second now. Not entirely unwarranted, if she were honest. The clicking had gotten faster, and every heartbeat sent jagged spikes of pain through her skull. She did _not_ have the energy for this.

 

"I'm fine," Blake grumbled.

 

"Are you sure? I mean, I know the stone's kind of hard to sleep on, but I bet we could figure something out. Ruby would probably lend you her cloak if you asked."

 

Blake would never dream of asking that, ever, especially since the unyielding stone had been at worst a minor inconvenience. She just shook her head, finally giving in to temptation and placing her hands over her feline ears. The phantom noise went silent. Blake froze.

 

"Wha—" Yang started to ask. Suddenly a terrific _crack_ rent the air, and everyone stumbled as the ground shook beneath them.

 

"Cave-in!" Sky screamed out in panic. He was, unfortunately, wrong.

 

A massive chunk of the wall buckled inward. Bits of stone tore free of the few scraps of webbing still holding them together and shattered on the ground. A few rock splinters hit her bare shoulders. They bounced harmlessly off of her skin, but she felt the drain on her aura immediately. It was too weak, she hadn't slept well enough to fully restore it.

 

She dropped into a crouch, flinging one hand across her face to shield her eyes. With the other, she fumbled for Gambol Shroud. She'd heard clicking—a first it had seemed like another symptom of her migraine, but it could just as easily have been footsteps.

 

When she finally dared look at the cave wall, she saw that it had vanished entirely. What was left of it was scattered across the floor in pieces, revealing another long, dark tunnel that had once been entirely separate from the one they were in. A bone mask hovered in its mouth, half-shrouded in shadow.

 

Blake couldn't help but boggle at the Spider's sheer size. It's long, angular legs had been squeezed underneath it as it crouched inside a passage at least ten feet in diameter. The monster squirmed uncomfortably, looking for all the world like a disgruntled squirrel midway through the sudden realization that it was now too fat to leave its burrow. Then its forelegs punched through into empty air and slammed into the opposite end of the cave. Bulging red eyes the size of her face blinked in annoyance, and at last it managed to maneuver its head through the opening it had made. The tunnel _they_ were standing in, Blake realized dimly, was rather a lot larger than the one it had come from.

 

Her body was moving before her brain had time to catch up. Pure adrenaline shot through her, washing away some of her exhaustion. She lashed out with Gambol Shroud, grinning as the gun went off and sent the bladed end spinning around toward the monster's eyes. It hissed resentfully, jerking its head so that her weapon bounced off its mask.

 

Yang charged, hair flickering and fists poised to strike. Ruby was already there, though she was hammering off shots with her rifle rather than trying to engage the Spider in melee—Blake couldn't blame her. Weiss had backed off slightly and was grimacing at the hilt of her sword. She, too, was reluctant to come within biting distance, but she was low on ammunition and might not have a choice.

 

Behind them, Jaune and Sky both took up positions with their scrolls, casting an eerie blue glow over the Grimm as it scrabbled for purchase on the cave floor. It was still stuck, and getting more and more irritated by the second. One of its legs lashed out, and Blake was forced into a sloppy somersault to avoid being clotheslined. Her head spun, even when she had gotten to her feet again.

 

Fuming now, the Spider finally lurched forward into the cavern, unfolding like a titanic and malevolent fan. Its pitch-black legs slammed into the walls, floor, and ceiling alike, leaving the monster perched in the center of the tunnel, hissing and spitting in fury.

 

****

 

 

Blake backed up a step reflexively, and swore when she realized that she'd stepped in another of the webs. Black silk was suddenly everywhere, hemming them in as they lined up to face the monster. She struggled to free herself, yanking on her foot and coming down hard on one knee when she finally tore herself loose. With a grunt, she forced herself back to her feet. Her pistol snapped up, and she fired a full clip into the Grimm's face.

 

It didn't so much as flinch. Instead it scuttled forward, rotating midair until it was upside-down and snarling. Ruby and Weiss retreated, the former punctuating each step with a gunshot and the latter finally letting loose a burst of ice on the Grimm's legs and pinning it in place.

 

For a moment, the monster just stared at her. It looked almost offended. Then it _squealed,_ rage and indignation mixing as it lunged. Weiss backpedaled, skimming across a line of glyphs. Yang called out a warning, and at the last second she darted to her left, dodging one of the webs.

 

Pyrrha spun into the fray from somewhere behind them, javelin clashing against the Spiders' armored forelegs. It glared at her, suddenly shifting its attention. Massive fangs dug into the ground where her feet had been mere heartbeats before, but her only response was to bury her weapon into the nearest vulnerable spot she could find. When in doubt, go for the eyes.

 

The rest of team JNPR—minus Jaune, who was busy making sure they didn't have to do any of this blind—was right behind her. Nora, limited by the fact that she couldn't use her grenades without bringing the whole cave down on top of them, contented herself with aiming bone-shattering blows at the Spider's thin legs. It was almost impossibly agile, dancing in place with its slender limbs slipping in and out of her reach, always bringing it closer. Ren slid underneath the monster and slashed at its belly. He was nearly impaled on one long fang, and had to retreat and start shooting instead. Seconds later, his gun clicked empty. He didn't reload.

 

With a bloodthirsty howl, Cardin charged forward with his mace held over his head. The ordeal of the past few days had done absolutely nothing to improve his already abysmal speed, and his blows were neatly avoided. Dove had more luck—he came in swinging and physically interposed himself between the Spider and the rest of their group, even going so far as to catch one of its legs on his gauntlets. Its feet, Blake noticed, were tipped with wicked hooked claws, in a rather stunning example of the inherent unfairness of the universe.

 

It advanced like a glacier—slowly, yet inexorably. In theory, moving the battle back down the tunnel was to the monster's disadvantage. Blake could remember having to duck a few times on their way here, meaning the cave would eventually narrow too much for it to fit. But, in practice, with each step backward they had to avoid the webs.

 

Blake was probing the creature's armored body for weak spots, taking care to keep Gambol Shroud's ribbon from tangling on its legs, when all of a sudden there was a scream and half the light when sideways. She risked a glance over her shoulder, and caught a glimpse of Sky flailing helplessly where he was trapped against a wall of silk.

 

Russel stopped hacking at the monster's mask and dropped back to help his teammate. Even as he began to cut Sky loose, Blake knew it was going to take too long. She grimaced, placing herself between them and it, resolving to keep fighting as long as she could. The Grimm's red eyes were still fixated on Pyrrha as she retreated with liquid grace, stepping around bits of silk without even looking. It seemed vaguely affronted by that.

 

Sky screamed again as the Spider cocked its head, sizing up its opposition, and lunged. He wasn't anywhere near the line of fire, in fact he was still several dozen feet away. Pyrrha dropped to the ground as one of its slender legs whistled through the space where her head had been, while Cardin ducked a moment too late and was launched into the stone wall with a grunt. Dove managed to catch the blow on his sword, though he skidded back several feet from the force of it.

 

Blake, unprepared for the sudden attack, leaped desperately backwards as another of the Spider's legs shot toward her. A shadow clone died ignobly, crumpling to dust with a hooked claw through its chest—and Blake herself landed on her back foot, reeling as her boot stuck fast to the ground. Her eyes widened in sudden horror, and she began to tip backward.

 

In an instant, a white bone mask was in front of her. It took up the whole of her vision, and two massive fangs shot toward her unprotected abdomen. Blake would not be poisoned—she'd be impaled. The force of the strike would be enormous, she could already sense the momentum behind it, a sort of intuitive terror that ran all the way up and down her spine. With the last bit of strength in her, she threw herself away from the oncoming attack. Her back met more silk.

 

Not even a full yard away from her face, a pale white glyph sprang into being. The Spider met it head-on, fangs crashing into it with the force of a runaway train. Blake stared, realizing very suddenly how fragile the barrier looked, paper-thin and translucent. It seemed insane that it should stand up to so much force.

 

It didn't. The glyph failed a second later, and somewhere in the dark Blake heard a body hitting the floor with a solid thump. But then, it hadn't _needed_ to stop the attack—it just needed to slow it down.

 

Dove flung himself in front of her even as the barrier was breaking, planting his feet and shoving his sword against the fangs as though they were a pair of blades. He shouted something, probably a curse, and began to slide. The metal in his boots screamed as they scraped against the stone floor, and then he crashed into her.

 

Blake's forehead bounced off the back of his armor with a clang, and then the monster was gnashing its teeth in Dove's face. He yelped, gave a final shove, and overbalanced the pair of them. The web supporting them tore loose, and they went down in a tangle of limbs and a clatter of steel. Her head hit the ground, and this time her aura failed and stars exploded into her field of vision.

 

It was hard to see with Dove half on top of her, half stuck to her, but she knew the Spider was still coming. Gambol Shroud flew from her hand, spinning end over end as she hurled it blind. Someone, she couldn't tell who, grabbed the ribbon and _pulled,_ and both she and Dove were sent skidding across the cavern floor. The Grimm's lunge finally ended as it slammed into a pillar of stone and shattered it.

 

Blake forced herself upright even as the world spun dizzily around her. She lurched, nearly threw up, and found herself leaning against Nora's arm—she must have been the one who'd caught the other end of Gambol Shroud. Reaching down, Blake gave Dove a hand up to his feet. One of his legs buckled, making him stumble. His hair, usually immaculate, was full of silk and sticking up in all directions, but he managed a sage nod. She returned it, torn between gratitude and intense discomfort.

 

The Grimm, livid from having missed its prey, emerged from the cloud of dust and stone shards with its eyes glowing with rage. With a low, dry _hiss,_ it went skittering across the cavern floor, legs lashing out in all directions. Cardin caught a glancing blow to the shoulder and careened into the wall again, howling curses. Weiss, who had been trying to drag herself upright with her rapier, threw herself sideways to avoid the blow. Blake could actually _hear_ her head hit the ground as she landed, and winced in sympathy.

 

Despite having been under fire from all twelve of them from the moment it had appeared, the Spider seemed none the worse for the wear. It had weathered gunshots to the eyes, vicious slashes to the undersides of its many knees, and even a head-on collision with a stone pillar at top speed, all without so much as slowing down. Usually, this was when one of their team leaders would start getting creative.

 

Blake wanted to help, and was wracking her brain for something they could do to get around how absurdly tough this creature was, but her thoughts felt as though they were moving through molasses. Nothing occurred to her, and before she could really consider the problem she was forced back into motion. Another long, slender leg smashed into her, slaughtering one of her clones. She dodged sideways and threw Gambol Shroud.

 

Then Dove stumbled, catching himself on the wall with a grunt. Blake could see him swaying where he stood. She stepped very deliberately in front of him. There was no way in hell she was going to stay indebted to _him_ any longer than she had to. The Grimm's head swiveled toward them, though she couldn't tell whether it was looking at her or Dove. Its fangs clicked together irritably as it sized them up.

 

Blake had seen jumping spiders before, and this Grimm wasn't one. It was too big to move as quickly as they did, and its legs were far too long and thin. And yet, rather than running towards them as Blake had expected, it _leaped._

 

She couldn't tell how _._ She only saw its front legs extending like a quartet of long black spears, and then it was _flying._ Her brain, already sluggish from hunger and exhaustion, couldn't process the sight in front of her in time. She felt something smash into her, yelped, and was borne to the floor.

 

Her head, for the third time in as many minutes, cracked against the floor, though she barely noticed. It was her shoulder that demanded her attention. Something hot was soaking into her sleeve, and when she tried to sit up she nearly blacked out. The Spider's face loomed over her, eyes bulging in anticipation.

 

Kicking out in blind desperation, Blake felt her boot connect with one of the foot-long fangs that were bearing down on her. The Grimm hissed in annoyance. That meant it opened its jaws, just as Blake had hoped. So, with her free arm, she shoved Gambol Shroud down its throat. Well, into its mouth anyway—she wasn't sure if spiders _had_ throats in the conventional sense.

 

And then, there was _noise._ Her ears folded back reflexively as the Grimm howled in agony and shook its head like a dog. It was trying to rid itself of the blade, but Blake wasn't done. She gave the ribbon a sharp tug, and fired a round from where Gambol Shroud was still lodged in the monster's mouth. Then, finally, it backed away. Its clawed foot slid free of her arm with a sickening grinding sound. Her vision blurred. Pure terror forced her to her feet, but the world was spinning and all she really managed to make out was that now, it was the _Grimm_ that was retreating.

 

When her eyes came back into focus, she saw Yang first. It was hard not to, considering she was on fire. Her fists were flying, beating out an irregular rhythm on the Grimm's bone mask. The monster flailed at her, but was forced to back away as shot after shot detonated right in its face. If the bullets weren't hurting it, the light of the flames certainly was.

 

Ruby was with Yang, covering any possible gaps in her defense. Weiss had positioned herself a few paces back, and was striking only when the Spider was pained or disoriented. The way her forehead was bleeding was all the explanation Blake needed—she was low on aura from the shattered glyph.

 

Team JNPR was there, too, with Jaune having stashed his light in one of his pockets once Yang had caught fire. Even Cardin and Russel were taking part in the sudden assault. Dove, on the other hand, hung back. He was bent over, holding the wall for support as he breathed in great gulps. Sky, meanwhile, was still holding his scroll up to illuminate the scene before him. It was, at this point, entirely unnecessary.

 

Blake grimaced and took a step forward. Her shoulder throbbed in protest, but she forced herself to keep going. It took a moment to find where Gambol Shroud had landed—apparently the Spider had succeeded in shaking the weapon free of its mouth. When she did, she drew the blade and held it shakily in her right arm. Her left dangled uselessly.

 

She looked up just in time to realize that the sudden coordination hadn't been an accident. As if responding to some signal she couldn't see, Ruby called out, "Now!" Weiss fumbled with her rapier, pulled free one of the Dust compartments, and tossed it to Yang.

 

The Spider eyed her with newfound suspicion and began backpedaling. "No you _don't,"_ Yang growled, darting forward and grabbing hold of the edge of its mask. "Come here!"

 

Russel ducked one of its flailing legs, rolled forward, and stabbed his left dagger into the cave wall. Ice spread from the point of impact, trapping two of the monster's feet. It struggled, nearly taking the boy's head off with another of its clawed feet before he fell back behind Cardin.

 

Blake caught the gist of the plan as it was unfolding, and leapt forward with the aid of a shadow clone. Gambol Shroud flew through the air and wrapped around one of the monster's legs. "Nora!" she called out. With a manic salute, Nora grabbed hold of Gambol shroud's ribbon and _heaved,_ yanking its foot out from under it.

 

Within moments, the monster was frozen to the wall by two legs, and another was caught in Nora's grip. It tried to rear back onto its hind feet, but couldn't keep its balance. Ruby darted in close and fired point-blank into one of its eyes, making it screech in pain. That was its undoing—the moment it opened its mouth Yang stepped forward and _shoved_ the Dust cylinder inside.

 

Dozens of red eyes widened almost comically. Then, the Grimm _burst_ into bits of bone plating and strings of sticky black gore. Ruby, Yang, and Pyrrha were all coated from head to foot, and an errant arc of electricity—apparently it had been lightning Dust—blasted Jaune off his feet.

 

And then, there was silence. Dark smoke dissipated into the air, and Blake watched it go with a sick feeling in her gut. How long would it take before the Grimm was back—a few years? Months? _Days?_ Would it emerge from that vile lake the second all its essence had returned, pulling itself free and wandering back to its old hunting grounds without a second thought? Or maybe it would be like the smaller Spiders they'd fought, and any one of them could reach that same incredible size, given time.

 

Blake took a step forward and gasped. White-hot agony spread from her shoulder to her elbow and sent pins and needles running all the way down to the tips of her fingers. Dazed, she put out her good arm to balance herself as the world spun around her. She fell to her knees with a grunt.

 

Several voices called her name in unison, and then Yang was at her side, gingerly putting pressure on the wound. Blake winced, but bore the fussing with as much grace as she could muster. Dove wordlessly handed her partner the roll of bandages—they'd run out of the disinfectant—and soon enough her arm was bound in clean white linen.

 

"We should take a break," Ruby said, fidgeting with her cape.

 

Blake shook her head, trying to stand. Her vision swam, and she nearly fell flat on her face. "Can't," she groaned. "There might be more of them."

 

"Yeah, I vote we get the fuck out of here," Russel agreed. "The sooner we're back at Beacon, the sooner we can get actual medical treatment."

 

"No one asked you," Yang snarled. Then she turned back to Blake, all anger draining from her expression. "Are you sure?"

 

She considered nodding, then decided against it. Throwing up wouldn't help her case much. Instead she just replied, "Yes."

 

Yang helped her to her feet, and when Blake tried to protest she just slung her good arm over her shoulder and started walking. They'd been pushed back quite far—it took several minutes before they passed the gaping hole the Spider had come from.

 

In near-perfect unison, all twelve of them glanced at the opening with varying levels of unease, mistrust, and outright terror. Then, with as much speed as they could muster with Dove limping and Blake hanging off of Yang, they hurried past it. Even hours later, Sky still turned at least once every few minutes, like clockwork, to scan the tunnel behind them—waiting, perhaps, for the monster to return from the dead.


	9. Chapter 9

 

"Stop being a stubborn bastard," Russel grunted. Dove kept limping, outright ignoring his teammate as he focused on the tunnel ahead.

 

"Dove," Sky pleaded. "Come on, at least let us splint it up or something."

 

"We'll stop when we're past all these webs," Dove replied stubbornly. "I can walk."

 

"You broke your ankle!" Russel stared at him, incredulous. "What's wrong with you?!"

 

"It's not broken, just sprained."

 

"That's not the point," Sky groaned, rubbing at his temple. "You're going to make it worse."

 

"My aura can handle it."

 

_Oh, for the love of—_ Sky slapped a palm over his face.

 

"Belladonna isn't trying to walk," he pointed out. "And she didn't even hurt her leg. You know why?" Sky leveled a flat look at his partner. "Because she isn't dumb."

 

Dove scowled. "I'm more than capable of keeping up. Just drop it."

 

And, with a sigh, Sky threw his hands up and did just that—though he resolved to be absolutely _merciless_ with the 'I told you so's when his partner's ankle inevitably swelled up like a grapefruit. He also made sure to keep an eye on his partner in case he fell. That was the only reason he even noticed that Belladonna was staring at him.

 

Sometimes when he shot glances at Dove, he caught her distinctive yellow eyes darting away from his direction, so fast that he almost thought he was imagining it. He started switching his attention between her and Dove, mostly to prove that it was just a weird coincidence, but no. She was sneaking peeks at him whenever he turned his head away. _Did I do something to piss her off?_ Then she stumbled over a rock and bit down on a scream as it jarred her shoulder. All eyes turned to her, but she didn't so much as acknowledge them. Just found her footing again and went back to lurching along beside Yang like a zombie.

 

After _that,_ Sky was watching Blake to make sure she didn't collapse. He split his attention between her and his partner, but it turned out that neither of them were the first to fall—it was Lie. As they were passing the last of the black webs he stopped short, then lurched and would have faceplanted if Nora hadn't caught him around the middle.

 

"Ren!" she yelped, lowering him gently to the ground. "Are you okay?"

 

"Dizzy," he groaned. Sky, who had already been reeling, gave up and flopped down a few feet away. His head was pounding, and he curled up in a disconsolate ball as soon as he was no longer upright.

 

"He needs water," Jaune murmured.

 

"Are you sure?" Schnee knelt next to Lie—it was to him that she directed her question. He tilted his head, frowning.

 

"I'd rather press on," he decided. His voice cracked halfway through. "Though... I wouldn't be opposed to a small rest."

 

"Fuck this," Russel declared. "Hook me up, will you?" The Schnee raised an eyebrow.

 

"Russ," Dove interjected, "it's dangerous."

 

"Don't care." Russ shrugged his shoulders. "As long as I get something to drink, I'm your guinea pig."

 

She considered that a moment, then started spinning the chamber of her sword. "Russ," Sky hissed. "The hell are you doing?"

 

"It's not gonna kill me right away." Russel flopped down next to him, then folded his legs into a pretzel. "Can't be worse than this."

 

"Yes," the Schnee said, as a small spire of ice spread out from the point of her rapier. "It can. But thanks for offering to test it." Her tone was a whole lot more sardonic than it was grateful. Sky wanted to snap at her, but instead he just scowled at his shoes.

 

Yang gingerly deposited Belladonna on the ground next to Lie, then strode over to the ice and cracked her knuckles. "Nora? D'you want to do the honors?" Her friend's eyes lit up, making Sky shudder. Then she swung a nasty left hook, catching Yang on the jaw and spinning her halfway around.

 

"Ow," she grunted, but her hair caught fire so Sky counted it as a win.

 

"This is going to take forever," Schnee grumbled. The ice _was_ melting, but not what you'd call _quickly._ Dove tossed an empty bottle in the general vicinity of Yang's head, and she reached up and snagged it out of the air. Sky noticed her wince—had the spider bite from before still not healed?

 

"Okay," Ruby chirped, sitting cross-legged at her sister's side. "I guess we take a break until this melts, then."

 

"And until we find out if this dumbass is going to drop dead or not," Cardin muttered under his breath. Russel laughed at him.

 

"Aw, are you worried or someth—ah!" Cardin punched him in the shoulder, and he nearly tipped over.

 

"Yeah," he grunted. "Worried I'll have to carry you if you keel over. That gets old fast."

 

Sky caught Belladonna glancing guiltily at Yang. So did her partner, who rolled her eyes and jabbed a thumb at Cardin, as if to indicate what she thought about _that_ with body language alone.

 

The others fell into the usual rhythm of laughing and chatting, distracting themselves from their surroundings with wild abandon. Sky couldn't muster the energy to join them. His throat felt like it was full of dust and cobwebs, and he was fairly sure that he wouldn't be able to swallow if he tried. The glacier of dubious chemical content was looking more appealing by the minute.

 

Eventually, people started to move around. Cardin wandered away from Russ and Dove, and team JNPR arrayed themselves around the ice spire like it was some kind of reverse-campfire. Sky was left by himself, sitting nearly ten feet from his nearest classmate. Part of him was anxious about that—what if a Grimm attacked them, he'd be the _first line of defense_ and that had to be the worst idea he'd ever heard in his life. Another, larger part was just glad he didn't have to talk to anyone.

 

Until, after about a quarter of an hour, the silence was broken. "Hello," someone said softly, a few paces away from him. Sky looked up, and his eyes bugged right out of his skull when he realized it was Belladonna.

 

"Uh, hi," he managed. She was sitting next to him. _Why was she sitting next to him?!_

 

She dropped her scroll on the ground between them, where it lit up her eyes so that they seemed to glow with some kind of inner fire. They were, without a doubt, _predator's_ eyes. Sky gulped—apparently he _could_ still swallow past his dry throat. For a moment, it seemed like she wasn't going to say anything, like she was just going to plop down next to him without _any_ kind of explanation and leave him a sweaty, nervous mess for no reason whatsoever. Then, finally, "You haven't been talking about it, much."

 

"What?" he blurted out, baffled.

 

"About... the Grimm. What we found out."

 

_Oh, not_ this _again..._ "No," he grumbled. "I haven't." He'd barely been able to handle having this conversation with his partner, he really wasn't interested in a repeat performance.

 

"What do you think?" she asked bluntly.

 

_We're fucked, and your friends are delusional._ "I don't know." She looked at him, and the sheer intensity of her gaze made him shrink into his armor like a frightened tortoise.

 

"Do you believe there's a way out of it?"

 

"No," he admitted. And then, because he was fed up with all this cryptic bullshit, "Why are you asking me?"

 

Belladonna opened her mouth to answer, then froze at the sound of Nora bursting into laughter behind them. Ruby joined in, and then they were all giggling like little kids. She scowled, glanced behind her, and stood up. "Not here."

 

Sky followed her lead reluctantly, sparing a last look over his shoulder at where Dove was sitting. He met his partner's eyes, jerked his head at Belladonna, and then pointed down the tunnel. Dove raised an eyebrow incredulously, then tapped his sword. _Do you want me to help?_ Sky shook his head no, and followed her into the darkness. Now someone would know where he'd gone, in case she decided to hurt him. He knew she wouldn't, not when they were depending on one another to survive down here, but still. Better safe than garroted by a giant ribbon.

 

They stopped as soon as they were far enough away that they wouldn't be overheard. Sky stood there a moment, waiting, growing increasingly uncomfortable until he managed to blurt, "What's up?"

 

Belladonna sighed explosively, then slid down the cavern wall until she was sitting on her heels. At this point Sky was so out of his depth that he wondered if Russel _wasn't_ just an idiot, and girls really _were_ as hard to understand as he always said. Glancing between her and the scroll she'd laid facedown on the ground, he cautiously lowered himself down next to her.

 

Finally, she spoke again. "It seems like you haven't been sleeping much."

 

Sky made a face. _You don't look so good yourself,_ he thought grumpily. "It's that obvious?"

 

"Well, yes. That's... what I wanted to ask you about."

 

"Yeah?" he prompted, after a pause.

 

She stayed silent for long enough that he started to suspect she was just fucking with him and this was some kind of bizarre revenge for the whole thing with Scarlatina. Then she leaned back until her head brushed the stone and said, "I can't really talk to my team about it."

 

"Huh?" Sky stared at her, completely thrown. He remembered the way her friends had hovered over her while she was staggering along, barely conscious from the wound in her shoulder. Maybe _he_ didn't find them approachable, but he hadn't thought she would have a problem.

 

"I know they _mean_ well. It's just... I figured something out. And I can't—I can't talk to them about it."

 

"Why not?"

 

"Because it's bad. Really bad. Ruby wouldn't let it stop her, I've never seen _anything_ get her down for more than a moment—" at that, a fond smile ghosted across her face, "—but I don't know how Yang would react. And Weiss... it wouldn't be good." Sky shifted apprehensively. He didn't like where this was going.

 

"What—" his voice cracked, and he had to clear his throat and start over. "What is it? This thing you figured out?"

 

"I think we might be livestock," she whispered, fingers tangling in the fabric of her vest.

Sky suddenly imagined himself on a conveyor belt, borne further and further into a shining stainless-steel factory, drawn inexorably toward a Beowolf in a blood-stained apron. His breath hitched in his throat and he hugged his knees to his chest. "Would you mind elaborating?" he whimpered.

 

"This... it doesn't make sense," she hissed, fists clenching. His eyes fell on her knuckles, where there was still a livid bruise in the shape of a bite mark. "The Grimm can overrun Vale whenever they want. But suppose they're stupid enough that they can't find the city when it's just thirty miles away." Sky flinched. "They still should've overrun that village we were deployed at a _long_ time ago. That... well, it just leaves the thought that they're doing it on purpose."

 

"Oh." Sky let out a breath, gathering himself. He frowned. "That's... not so bad, really." She turned to stare at him incredulously.

 

"What? _How_ is that not a bad thing?!"

 

"Well, they're _not_ killing us all," Sky pointed out. "If you're right... it means they already know that Vale exists, and they _won't_ wipe us out. In my book, that's a good thing."

 

Belladonna laughed bitterly. "I guess you _are_ an optimist."

 

"That's the first time anyone's told me that." He paused, frowning. "Why come to me about this, though?"

 

"I told you," she sighed. "I couldn't talk to my team."

 

"So? Why me? You could have gone to team Juniper, couldn't you?"

 

"Why do you even care?" Her hands clenched into fists where they rested on her knees.

 

"I didn't think you liked me very much," he said, shrugging.

 

The faunus scowled at him. "I don't. I haven't forgotten what you did to Velvet."

 

Sky flushed, right down his neck and, if he were to guess, even across his chest and back. His body really didn't do moderation when it came to blushing. He opened his mouth to apologize, but thought better of it. It would be better to talk to Scarlatina, since _she_ was the one he'd made fun of—but... no. That wasn't why. He was just afraid.

 

Still, it wasn't like he was _totally_ on the moral low ground here. He narrowed his eyes at her and said bluntly, "So you want to talk to me, because you don't care if I lose sleep over it."

 

She flinched. "I thought it might be easier to explain it to you."

 

_"Why?!"_ It wasn't quite a shriek, he _did_ remember that they were supposed to be keeping their voices down, but his voice went up in pitch and he slapped a palm over his face in sheer frustration. "Why would you _possibly_ think that?"

 

"Because you haven't been sleeping."

 

Sky blinked. Frowned. He remembered her and Ruby arguing in the aftermath of that horrible revelation, the way the rest of her team had spoken so casually about fighting a losing battle. Like they didn't even care.

 

"Oh," he breathed. He was _such_ an idiot. He'd even noticed the way she was stumbling along, barely functional and constantly zoning out. It was, if he looked back, almost _exactly_ how he'd been acting. _Huh._

 

Belladonna was fidgeting again, scratching a fingernail across the fabric of her... tights? Leggings? Why were girl clothes so complicated, anyway? Sky groaned and let his head fall back against the stone. It had been farther away than he'd thought, and he cracked his skull with a yelp. "Son of a—" he mumbled, then trailed off.

 

"I guess we're both a bit of a mess, then," he said, when the silence grew uncomfortable. The faunus looked distinctly unamused. He noticed with fascination that her ears flicked back when she was annoyed—just like a cat's.

"I'm only being realistic," she grumbled. "They don't—they don't _understand,_ I try to talk to them about it and they keep saying that it'll be fine." Her voice rose as she spoke, until she had to drop it back to an angry hiss.

 

"Dove talked to me, before," Sky said, peering down the tunnel toward where their friends were. "He doesn't really get it, either. I think he thinks we can all hear some half-assed explanation for how we could beat them and just... go with it."

 

"It's not half-assed."

 

"It was pretty half-assed," Sky argued playfully. The words rang hollow, and he let his feeble attempt at a grin drop off his face.

 

"Ruby really believes it," she insisted, shaking her head. "And I want to. I want..." her breath hitched. "I'm sick of keeping secrets, and now I have one I can't ever talk to them about."

 

"Why not?" Sky asked. "I mean, _I'm_ not going to tell my team, but that's because Cardin will push me into a wall, Russ won't give a shit anyway, and Dove will lecture me for half an hour about the pride of humanity."

 

"They wouldn't understand." Sky raised an eyebrow.

 

"Okay, I would bet literally everything I own—so basically just my clothes and my gear right now—that you said _exactly_ the same thing about being a faunus."

 

Her head snapped up. "How did you—"

 

"Lucky guess. And... sorry, but that is the biggest cliché I've ever heard. Why do you _really_ want to keep it secret?"

 

"What if they _do_ understand?" Her voice was pleading, now. "Then what have I done? Ruby... I thought she was just naive when I met her, but she sees the best in everything, and it's..." she stopped, collecting her thoughts. "It's like, no matter what happens, she'll still meet it head-on, because she can't even imagine a world that's so unfair that the heroes would lose. I'd never forgive myself if I ruined that."

It still sounded pretty naive to him, but he didn't think she'd appreciate him saying that out loud. "What about the others?" he asked instead.

 

"I don't know what Yang would say." A little half-smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Probably make a stupid pun."

 

Sky burst out laughing. "That was _awesome,_ by the way." He grinned, remembering their little standup routine. Then the smile slid off his face. She'd dropped the conversation like a hot potato the second she'd remembered that it was _him_ she was talking to.

 

"She's a lot like Ruby, though." Belladonna's expression had turned wry, but there was still a fondness in her tone that made Sky wonder if Cardin even knew what it was that he'd broken. "It's been a long time since I've had friends so... I don't know. Open. I wouldn't want to bring her down like that. And Weiss... I _know_ it would bother her."

 

"Wouldn't like being compared to a cow?"

 

"No, that's not what I meant. She... she'd hate the idea that we were being manipulated like that." Sky filed that away in the growing mental pile of _things I probably shouldn't have heard,_ and coughed awkwardly.

 

"Right," he said. "I guess you're fucked, then." It came out a bit more bitterly than he'd intended. Belladonna didn't want to talk to her teammates, not because she didn't trust them but because she cared about them. She saw an inner light in each of them that she didn't want to snuff out. And he... well, he had nothing of the sort.

 

She chuckled darkly. "I guess I am."

 

"See, this is where anyone else would tell you that you could trust them, that it's not your responsibility to shoulder it alone. And it's _not,_ you're being kind of ridiculous about it, but that's not my problem." He grinned a bit, to soften the edge of the words. "'Sides, apparently talking to strangers is easier for some people." Belladonna scoffed.

 

"No, really! That's the whole reason therapists are a thing!"

 

"Are you calling yourself my therapist?"

 

"Yep. Except I'm underqualified and underpaid, and—" he hesitated, almost losing his nerve. But, then again... _fuck it._ "I get to bitch at you, too."

 

"Really, now?" There was a hint of amusement in her expression, but it was replaced by suspicion as she scrutinized him. "Is this the part where you give me some stupid sob-story about how Cardin made you do it?"

 

Sky bit his lip. "Nah. It _was_ his idea, but I... I went along with it." He swallowed, and between his thirst and the lump in his throat he nearly choked. "I'm a coward."

 

The faunus stared at him, golden eyes wide. He squirmed under the sudden intensity of her gaze, then looked down at his shoes. "It's why I came here. To grow a pair. And now I'm stuck in a cave miles underground, and I just found out that the world is going to end and I'm not sure I'm ever going to sleep again." He paused, considering. "Irony is way less funny when it's happening to _me."_

 

"That's... an interesting reason for becoming a huntsman." She was giving him a _very_ strange look, now. "Why come here, when you could have just faced your fears yourself, without being in actual danger?"

 

"Well," Sky said, a bit annoyed now, "It sounded like a way better idea _before_ I found out that Ozpin's idea of an initiation involved being flung headfirst into the Emerald Forest."

 

Belladonna let out a startled bark of laughter, and the sound was so uncharacteristic and shocking that Sky found himself dumbstruck. He grinned—a slow, mischievous sort of grin that Dove would have recognized in an instant. "I'd like a little more of a learning curve, and less of a learning _cliff_ , you know?"

 

****

 

 

"I can't complain," she replied dryly. "I got my team into way more trouble than any of our classes."

 

"Was the train thing your idea, then? Because that was almost as awesome as it was completely insane."

 

"Technically that particular excursion was Ruby's plan." Her gaze dropped to the ground. "They were trying to help me, though."

 

Sky winced—he'd struck a nerve. "Well, it worked out in the end. You didn't even get detention."

 

"Actually, Ozpin was the one who gave us that mission. He said something about how we'd probably end up their no matter what he did, so he just let us through."

 

"Ah, so it's totally his fault." Sky put on a thoughtful frown. "Wait. Remind me to thank him, then, because if you hadn't been there... that would've been bad."

 

"Hm." She shot another sidelong glance his way, and he could tell she'd seen right through his attempt to make her feel a bit less guilty. _Whoops._

 

"Heh, well, anyway..." he hedged. Something about her eyes made it very difficult not to be anxious when she looked at him like that. _Definitely a cat thing,_ he thought. The only thing they were missing were the slit pupils—and now he was picturing them. Great.

 

"You're... friendlier than I was expecting." Sky blinked.

 

"Oh. Um, thanks?"

 

After a moment, she actually smiled at him. He gaped like an idiot, because of all the way's he'd imagined this conversation going, this was so far outside what he'd expected that he'd thought of her _killing_ him first.

 

"You're braver than you think you are," she said softly.

 

_"Huh?"_

 

"You stood up to Cardin. Before." Her ears twitched— _they really_ are _a part of her_.

 

Sky was blushing again, though this time it was more out of embarrassment and so much gratitude that he couldn't seem to form words. "I, uh... oh." His heart sank, as he remembered. "It wasn't... it wasn't really like that."

 

"Was I hallucinating?"

 

He squirmed where he sat, suddenly ashamed. "No. I wasn't thinking like that, though. I didn't want him acting like an asshole while we were down here. We can't fight amongst ourselves or we'll die. I wanted... I wanted to make sure you'd still be on our side. It wasn't _brave,_ it was just selfish."

 

"Most people wouldn't be able to think that far," she replied. "I've seen human prejudice before. It's _senseless,_ sometimes they don't even care if they're hurting themselves, too. I'm not saying you're a paragon of nobility, but... it's a start."

 

Sky managed a grin. "Well, that _was_ the idea." She smiled back, and for a second it was almost like they were friends.

 

"I'm not," he murmured. "I'm not..."

 

"Not what?"

 

"A good person." The words felt heavy, almost leaden. He'd been sick to his stomach for weeks, now, like they'd been roiling around in his guts. It didn't feel cleansing to get them out. Just... empty.

 

"No, you're not." Her brow was furrowed, and he was pretty sure that look on her face was pity. Sky hiccupped, and then he was _crying_ and this was definitely a new low even for him.

 

"It never _works,"_ he burst out. "I don't change, I just tell myself I'm going to be braver and then I go and abandon Cardin to that Ursa. And Jaune, the _one_ person who's worse than me at fighting, he doesn't even _flinch."_

 

"So? You're going to give up?" Her expression hardened a bit, and Sky crumpled.

 

"I can't _help_ it! I'm always like this, I can't _do_ anything. I thought I'd just waltz right into Beacon and somehow turn into this great hero but I'm still just a scared little boy!"

 

"So _keep trying."_ The faunus stared at him, _through_ him, those piercing yellow eyes stripping him right down to his bones. He trembled, and it was ridiculous to be so afraid of her when she was just another teenager like him—or maybe it wasn't, because she was worth something in a fight and he probably never would be.

 

Then she sighed, and said, "That's what I've been doing."

 

Sky glanced up sharply, not quite sure he'd heard right. "What?"

 

She looked away. "I get scared, too. I never face my problems, I've been running from them as long as I can remember. It's even my semblance, I make a copy of myself to take the fall while I get away."

 

He laughed. The sound was hollow even to his own ears. "I don't have one."

 

"Everyone does." Her gaze flickered over him, as if she were trying to guess what it might be. "You just haven't found it yet."

 

"Yeah," he mumbled. Dove had said the same thing, and he was sure it was true. He just didn't think he'd ever figure out what it was. You had to be brave for that, didn't you?

"It's not something I'm proud of," Blake continued. "Running away. Every time I do it, I feel awful. But... it's hard. So I keep at it. I suppose... you could say that's part of why I came to Beacon, too. I wanted to be a better person than I was."

 

"Wish granted," he muttered bitterly.

 

"No." Sky turned to stare at her. "I still do it, sometimes. When my team found out, about..." she trailed off, gestured to the top of her head. "I ran away."

 

"Not for good, I'm guessing."

 

Blake shook her head. "They found me. And I promised not to do something like that again, to come to them first." Sky frowned. That sounded like it contradicted what she'd said about her livestock theory.

 

"Why are you scared?" he asked, after a while. "I've seen you fight. You're...  well, better than my team." Even Dove. They'd sparred, once, and Blake had picked him apart with a kind of ruthless efficiency that had made Sky wonder whether they had some bad blood between them. He'd asked his partner afterward, and he'd just shrugged and said they'd never talked.

 

She looked down at the cavern floor. "I don't know. It's just how I am. But I'm determined to be better, for my team if nothing else. I think you could be, too." His eyes burned at that, his fingers picking away at loose threads on his sleeves as he fidgeted. Everything she said sounded so sincere, like she actually _believed_ in him for some reason he just couldn't fathom.

 

"Why do you care?!" Sky burst out, because he had to know why she was being this nice to him, after months of cold glares. He pressed his arms against his stomach, hugging himself as he rocked back and forth. "You hate me, remember?"

 

"I did, but... I don't know if I still do."

 

"You should," he choked out. "I see you differently now, you know? I notice your eyes, your _ears..._ I keep thinking you look like a predator." She flinched away, as though he'd slapped her. Sky curled into himself, sobbing wretchedly. _Some huntsman._

 

"So?" she said finally. "What are you going to do about it?"

 

"I don't know," he admitted. "I thought I could just... stop. But that's harder than it sounds."

 

"It's not impossible."

 

"How would you know?"

 

"I've seen it." She put a hand on his shoulder—very gingerly, either because she was like Dove and didn't like to touch people or because she didn't want to touch _him_ specifically. "I don't know if people can change completely, but they can get better. You could get better."

 

He hiccupped again, reaching up and wiping at his face with his sleeve. It came away covered in tears and snot, and maybe it wasn't the _worst_ impression anyone had ever made with a pretty girl—he _hadn't_ called her snow angel—but he was still mortified.

 

Finally, he managed to pull himself together. With a last sniffle, he turned to look up at her and forced a smile. "Okay," he decided. "So, I've always had this image in my head of myself, or how I want to be. Before it was just a version of me that wasn't such a—" he stopped, realizing that he probably shouldn't say what he was about to blurt out in front of a cat faunus, or a girl for that matter. _Hey,_ he thought, _that's a start, right?_

 

Blake raised an eyebrow, and he realized with another wave of embarrassment that she'd probably figured out the aborted word. He coughed, deciding to keep talking because _honestly,_ this girl already had enough blackmail material to get him to do pretty much anything. _Heh, Blakemail material. No, focus._

 

"Anyway," he continued, "I guess I want to be... I don't know, the kind of person that would help someone like Scar—like Velvet. Not... what I did."

 

"What changed?"

 

He looked up, startled. "Huh?"

 

"I mean, what made you decide that?"

 

Sky flushed. "It was Jaune, actually."

 

"Really?"

 

"Kind of. It was when we first came down here. I knocked into Cardin and..." he swallowed, licked his lips nervously. "He was... uh... not happy. Then Jaune walked by and he gave me this sympathetic _look,_ and I thought, 'Hey! I'm not like you!" But I was, and it made me think about... what I'd been doing. Because it sucked."

Blake hummed. "Cardin gives you a hard time, doesn't he?"

 

"Yeah." Sky heaved a sigh. "He didn't when we first started. I guess he's been getting to be more and more of an ass around the dorm, lately. I think I've done more of his homework than my own," he joked. Blake didn't laugh.

 

"What about Dove and Russel?" she asked suspiciously.

 

"He doesn't mess with me when Dove's around." Sky grinned. "He's always a huge help. And Russ... I guess he tries, but Cardin's his partner and he doesn't like getting caught in the middle all the time." He swallowed, then admitted, "I try not to be in the dorm alone."

 

She frowned, looking at him out of the corner of her eye where she sat. "Listen. Wanting to be better, even _becoming_ better doesn't wash out what you did."

 

Sky looked away, tears welling in his eyes again. He swiped at them furiously and nodded.

 

"I'm not done." He glanced up. "You can't undo the bad things, but you can try to move forward, and it sounds like that's what you're trying to do." She bit her lip, hard enough that it went from red to white when she let go.

 

"I..." she started, then closed her mouth again. "If I tell you this... you don't mention it to _anyone._ Not Dove, not Russel, and _not_ Cardin."

 

"Um, okay."

 

"I'm serious." Her eyes had turned piercing again, and he was having trouble comparing them to anything less than x-rays. "If I find out you told anyone, I really _will_ ask Nora to break your legs."

 

That was _not_ an idle threat. Sky nodded vigorously, making a little crossing motion over his heart. She still looked deeply uncomfortable. Then she opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again.

 

"Before Beacon, I did some thing's I'm not proud of," she said, after a long moment. Sky froze. Was she saying—no, there was no way she was in the White Fang. Beacon did background checks. Still...

 

"Would you mind clarifying?" he asked, wiping his sweaty palms on his pants.

 

"Just... things like stealing. Vandalism. Someone I knew... I started hearing about him hurting people." A thrill of adrenaline shot up his spine, at that.

 

"I can't undo what I did," Blake continued. Her voice was low, almost brittle. "But I _can_ take steps to be a better person. We both can."

 

Sky actually laughed, at that. _Two peas. Two shriveled, shrunken, misshapen peas._ "I don't know. Sometimes it seems like I'm going nowhere."

 

"Of course it does." Her gaze sharpened again, the intensity making him want to curl up into a ball. "It takes time. I didn't even realize how much I needed to change until I started making real friends."

 

"I _have_ real friends." Sky's spine had straightened without him really noticing.

 

"That's not what I meant," she replied apologetically. Then her mouth twisted into a scowl. "Though I really don't know what you see in them."

 

Sky shrugged. "Russ can be funny if he wants to. He's a bit of an ass, but he wants us to get along so badly it drives him nuts. Dove's the best friend I've ever had, even if he can be a total _brick_ sometimes. And Cardin..." He grimaced. "I don't know. He's just... really insecure. Makes him a nightmare to be around."

 

Blake made a face, but said nothing. Sky started getting antsy again as the silence dragged. Then, finally, she shifted where she sat so that she could face him full-on. She gave him a calculating once-over that made him wish he'd straightened his armor beforehand. He steeled himself and stuck out a hand. Blake stared at it like it might bite her.

 

"How about this?" he asked. "We make... a pact, I guess. I'll try to be brave and treat people better, and you try not to run. Okay?"

 

She frowned, then gingerly shook. "To sticking around, and not being an asshole!" Sky declared. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it when Blake started smirking. It was probably at him rather than with him, but he decided he didn't mind.

 

When they returned, the rest of their class were still sitting around the little glacier, which had grown _far_ littler while they'd been talking—Sky hadn't even realized how long they'd been gone until he saw it. Dove shot him a look of naked concern the moment he saw him, and he noticed Yang wearing the same exact expression a few feet away.

 

He tried not to laugh like a madman, he really did, but then Blake noticed his mouth twitching and looked so affronted he couldn't hold it in anymore. It was silent laughter, at least.

 

"Miss me?" he asked his partner, once he'd sat down and gotten his breath back.

 

Dove narrowed his eyes. "Are you okay?" he asked.

 

Sky smiled. It wasn't a very wide smile, but it was the most genuine he'd managed in days. "Yeah," he decided. "I'm okay."


	10. Something to Protect

 

By the time Pyrrha noticed Blake was gone, she was already coming back.

 

She heard the shuffling of feet on stone, and looked up to see her friend walking down the corridor with _Sky Lark,_ of all people. Pyrrha scanned Blake's face anxiously, looking for any hint of anger or distress. She didn't look _happy_ by any stretch, but she seemed a little less tense.

 

Jaune nudged her shoulder, then jerked his head at the pair of them as if to say, _'What just happened?'_ She shrugged helplessly, then paused to watch Blake sit down next to Yang. Her partner was staring at her in open bafflement, but she just shook her head and whispered something in her ear.

 

"Okay," Cardin drawled, into the silence. "The fuck was that about?" Blake glared at him, and said nothing. Pyrrha supposed that was reassuring. She'd been starting to worry that Blake had been possessed or something. Still, for once Cardin had voiced _exactly_ what she'd been thinking—though he'd been far more crass.

 

Unfortunately, Blake seemed disinclined to talk about it. Sky was just as tight-lipped. The conversation moved on, but Pyrrha had trouble paying attention. At first, that was because she was so curious it _hurt._ Then, Jaune groaned and flopped forward so that his head was resting in his own lap. She put a tentative hand on his shoulder and asked if he was alright. He nodded, and his hair rubbed against the denim of his jeans until it stood on end. He looked a bit like a blond porcupine. Well, no, he was more like a hedgehog, cute and—

 

Pyrrha forcibly derailed that train of thought as she realized that when he'd leaned over, his elbow had been pushed out so that it was resting on her knee. She froze, fighting down conflicting urges to move away and, to her intense embarrassment, to inch closer.

 

It took longer than she was entirely comfortable with, but the feeling did pass. She grew used to the gentle pressure on her leg, and decided that she was being ridiculous. It was an elbow, there was nothing intimate or even particularly interesting about touching an _elbow._ Besides, he was always warm and the melting heap of ice Russel would soon be drinking was soaking up all the heat in the air.

 

That was her story, and she was sticking to it. Besides, Nora was hardly in any position to tease Pyrrha about her nonexistent love life.

 

Once she'd relaxed a little, she could theoretically have joined in the conversation. In _practice,_ she couldn't help feeling a bit... distracted. Jaune's face had turned slightly, and it seemed like he was _actually_ asleep and not just resting or pretending in order to be dramatic. She winced just _looking_ at the way his neck was bent—that was going to hurt, later. Some treacherous corner of her brain suggested that maybe she should help lay him down. Wasn't that what a good partner would do? Surely she couldn't just leave him there...

 

Pyrrha flushed, but couldn't seem to stop sneaking peeks at him as he dozed. That was creepy, wasn't it? But he'd fallen asleep right next to her, he was partly on _top_ of her, so it wasn't entirely her fault.

 

His expression was perfectly relaxed, mouth gaping open. His eyelashes were long, darker than his hair, and twitched occasionally as he dreamed. Most of his face was lost in deep shadow, making it seem sharper and more angular than it really was. And Pyrrha was staring.

 

She turned her head away, casting her gaze around for something, _anything_ else. Nora was telling a story, something about a car chase across an Atlesian air fleet—while in midair, of course.

 

Pyrrha's attention began to wander. The way Blake and Sky had snuck off reminded her of her talk with Jaune, when the whole world had fallen apart and he'd somehow managed to piece it back together. She wanted to thank him for that, but had no idea how she'd say it. It never felt sincere, when she tried to express gratitude—too many years of thanking her fans had made it routine to the point of being nearly meaningless.

 

Some corner of her mind, still reeling from the fact that he was sleeping only a foot shy of her lap, helpfully pointed out that thank-you kisses existed. Pyrrha hoped she wasn't as crimson as she felt, and tried to pay attention to Nora again.

 

"...jumped to the next ship," she was saying, voice thick with suspense. "And what do we find but a sky pirate masquerading as an Atlesian soldier!" Pyrrha felt her thoughts slipping away again, though this time they were drawn to the aching in her belly. The food fight came unbidden to her memory, tormenting her with the sights sounds and smells of the Beacon cafeteria.

_This is pointless,_ she scolded herself, running her tongue across her teeth as her stomach clenched. How long had it been, really, since she'd last eaten? Her eyes drifted to the tiny glacier Weiss had made, and she tried to lick her lips. _Tried,_ because they were so badly chapped that she was forced to stop. How long would they have to wait, to see if Russel suffered any ill effects from the water? Pyrrha frowned. It didn't really sit right with her anyway, experimenting on a classmate. Should she join him in testing it? Or would that, too, be selfish—taking a drink while her friends went thirsty. She didn't know anymore, and her head was spinning.

 

She winced, propping her chin on her hand to steady herself. Her eyelids fell shut, and for a moment she was drifting. Every thought came hazy and clouded, as part of her heard Nora's story and another part was conscious only of the warmth radiating from a point on her knee where Jaune's elbow was just barely resting. Her head dropped forward, and Pyrrha snapped awake. Then she began to fade again, and found herself nodding into her palm.

 

It was really no surprise that she was so exhausted. They hadn't been walking for a full day yet, but hunger and thirst had taken a heavy toll on all their bodies. Her aura had barely regenerated at all, despite the fact that it had been hours since their fight with the giant Spider.

 

That jolted her out of her daze. What about Blake? Her shoulder was badly hurt, and Pyrrha could tell even from across their little circle, even in the _dark,_ that there was blood seeping through her bandages. If Pyrrha's aura was strained, Blake's probably wasn't even active anymore.

 

Her heart began to pound, and she found herself looking down at Jaune again, seeking some sort of reassurance. Her breath pushed a strand of his hair down across his face, and he wrinkled up his nose in his sleep. For a moment, Pyrrha's mind shut down entirely. That was... that wasn't _fair,_ she was trying not to watch him while he was unconscious and then he went and did _that!_

 

And, with a small sigh, Pyrrha gave up. She was already sitting with her back to the wall of the tunnel, so she rested her head against it and let her eyes drift shut. The sounds of conversation blurred together, and she tried for a moment to follow them but found herself confused. Why did Nora need an umbrella...?

 

She woke with a start when Jaune's elbow began digging into her leg. He'd flopped over onto his side, so that he was very nearly lying in her lap. Pyrrha leapt to her feet and his head hit the ground with a _thud._

 

"I'm sorry!" she yelped, kneeling down next to him. He cracked one brilliant blue eye open, surveying his surroundings with drowsy indifference. Belatedly, his hand rose to cover the back of his head.

 

"Ow," he grumbled. "What just happened?"

 

"You fell over." Pyrrha conveniently left out what had happened between that and him falling asleep.

 

"Oh." He sat up, wincing. "Whoops." His nose crinkled again, and Pyrrha resisted the urge to bury her head in her hands.

 

Luckily, no one else seemed to have seen the incident—well, Nora had, but she didn't say anything. She _did_ look like she was trying hard not to burst out laughing (or cackling, given that it was Nora), but Pyrrha decided not to dwell on that.

 

Once she'd mostly gotten over her embarrassment, she realized that she must have slept through Nora's story. The teams had spread out somewhat—RWBY was nearly fifteen feet away, talking quietly amongst themselves. She frowned, momentarily confused.

 

"They didn't want to wake you," Ren explained, when he noticed the look on her face.

 

Team CRDL, who probably hadn't been quite as considerate, seemed to have moved over so that they could talk without being heard. That, or they weren't entirely comfortable around the other teams. Pyrrha wasn't entirely comfortable around _them,_ either, so she was hardly going to complain.

For a while, team JNPR took the opportunity for what it was and enjoyed their time together. It felt like it had been years since they'd been able to sit around and talk like this, without anyone else around. Not that she minded the others' company—actually, she _did_ mind team CRDL—but it was nice to spend time with just her team. She'd quickly grown accustomed to spending hours alone with them in the evenings, when it was too late to do anything—unless, god forbid, Yang and Nora had Plans—but they hadn't yet gone to bed. These were the people she knew best, and she could relax in their presence.

 

Or, well, she _wanted_ to relax in their presence. It was just that there was this small corner of her mind that wouldn't _shut_ _up_ about the fact that Jaune's elbow had been on her knee, that she'd accidentally dumped him on the floor, that she'd turned beet-red and Nora had _seen._ And, of course, she felt strangely compelled to sneak glances at him while they talked. He was animated and smiling despite the bags under his eyes, showing off a twin pair of dimples at the corners of her mouth. 

 

Slowly but surely, this was becoming _unbearable._ It wasn't fair that he still had that same boyish charm even when he was buried miles underground, covered in dirt and bits of stone and probably some blood, and with his hair slicked into a chaotic jumble of pointed spikes by sweat and grime. That shouldn't be _possible,_ and yet she was having trouble keeping her eyes trained on Ren and Nora.

 

Pyrrha sighed. This was hopeless—she needed help. She needed _advice._ That was a terrifying prospect, and she wondered if it was _really_ a good idea to be thinking about this _now,_ of all times. She'd half convinced herself to just drop it when Jaune stopped midsentence and yawned, revealing a pink tongue and scrunching his face up into an expression that was impossible to describe. Except, maybe, by just giving up all pretense and calling it _adorable._

 

 _I need to do something,_ she thought. It had only been getting worse by ignoring it, and if she were honest her ability to concentrate seemed to be compromised. What exactly had compromised it wasn't clear—it could have been Jaune, sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst, or any combination of the four—but it might be a problem if, _when,_ they had to fight again.

 

Thus decided, Pyrrha prepared to get to her feet... and promptly realized she still had no idea where to go for help. Although, the choice was made for her the second she thought about it. Nora had already given her lots of advice, most of it originally from Pyrrha herself. The problem was, she was starting to realize that Nora wasn't actually any kind of authority on how to turn friendship into something more. Ren, too, had told her to go with her heart and be honest, but... well... she was sort of hoping someone would know how to drop better hints, instead. Jaune was, for obvious reasons, completely out of the question.

 

That left team RWBY, since she was nowhere near desperate enough to ask her _other_ classmates. So, steeling herself for potential embarrassment, she stood up. Her teammates turned toward her curiously, and she suddenly blanked on possible excuses for moving over to the other team.

 

Pyrrha defaulted to the truth. That was probably for the best, since she wasn't a very good liar anyway. "I'll only be a moment," she murmured. "I wanted to ask for some advice about something."

 

"Okay," Jaune replied, frowning. Her stomach was _still_ trying to tie itself into knots every time she looked at him. Face flushed and dignity rapidly losing structural integrity, Pyrrha started over to where the other team was sitting.

 

This time, she at least managed to realize that she had no idea what to say _before_ she was asked a direct question. But, then again, it was far too late now to go back to her own team, since they knew she wanted to talk to the others. Pyrrha braced herself for the inevitable. A little embarrassment was par for the course, at this point.

 

"Pardon me," she said quietly, when she was close enough. All four of them turned to look at her—Ruby craned her neck backwards, giving Pyrrha an upside-down grin.

 

"Hey!" she chirped. "What's up?"

 

Hoping she didn't look quite as flustered as she felt, Pyrrha managed to say, "I actually wanted some advice, if you don't mind?" She kept her voice down, barely resisting the urge to glance over her shoulder to ensure she wouldn't be overheard. Both Weiss' and Blake's eyebrows shot up, but Yang just scooted over and gestured theatrically at the space she'd created. Heartened, Pyrrha seated herself cross-legged on the ground and began looking around nervously.

 

"Well?" Weiss asked, eventually. It was somewhere between gentle encouragement and exasperation, and Pyrrha tried to swallow down some of her anxiety. And her embarrassment, she supposed, though even if she _could_ be rid of it, she was fairly sure there was more in store for her. This conversation was not going to be good for her pride.

 

"I need help," she admitted. "With... um..." she glanced over her shoulder.

 

"Your man problem?" Yang suggested helpfully. Blake elbowed her hard in the shoulder with her good arm, and it looked a bit like Ruby was suppressing a giggle. Pyrrha gaped at them.

 

"You know?!"

 

"It's a little obvious." Blake at least had the grace to sound apologetic.

 

Pyrrha buried her face in her hands—and yes, that was _definitely_ the additional embarrassment she'd been expecting. "Then why hasn't he noticed yet?" she grumbled through her palm.

 

"Because he's incredibly dense," Weiss decided.

 

"He's not that bad," protested Ruby, though she didn't look convinced.

 

"He can be very insightful," Pyrrha said, mouth curving into a smile. Then she frowned. "Just... not when it comes to women."

 

"Heh, yeah..." Yang rubbed at the back of her neck, then shrugged. "Okay, what specifically did you need help with?"

 

"How do I get him to... well..."

 

"Figure it out?" It occurred to Pyrrha that her face was probably matching her hair right about now, and the fact that Yang was smirking certainly didn't help. She nodded.

 

"I think you could just tell him," Ruby said. "I mean, he's really nice, so he's not going to be mad or anything."

 

"I don't know..." Pyrrha hedged.

 

"Or..." Yang cut in, grinning a tad maniacally. If that was supposed to scare her, it wasn't working—she shared a room with Nora.

 

"Yes?"

 

"You could flirt with him a little."

 

"I don't know how," Pyrrha groaned. "I mean, I've tried dropping hints, but... well, it didn't work."

 

"How big of a hint?" Yang asked, cocking her head to one side.

 

"I may have told him that he was the sort of boy I wished I were going to the dance with."

 

Yang made a disgruntled noise. "That's... more of a confession than a hint."

 

"I told you he was dense," Weiss said. "Plain English doesn't always work on him."

 

"What would you suggest, then?" Pyrrha asked. She was, she supposed, rather desperate.

 

"How should I know?" A hand came up to rub at the bridge of her nose. "I'm trying to get him to _stop,_ not encourage him." Pyrrha's eye twitched. There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach—she'd have been _ecstatic_ if he'd shown up at her door with a guitar.

 

 _"Weiss,"_ Ruby scolded under her breath. Her partner looked slightly abashed, but didn't say anything.

 

"What about you, Blake?" Yang asked. Her partner started, obviously not expecting to be directly addressed.

 

Pyrrha frowned again, though this time it was with concern. Blake... didn't look great. None of them did, really, but... well, there were bags under her eyes so pronounced that it looked like she'd been punched in the nose. This time it seemed that she hadn't stopped listening altogether, because when Blake turned to look at Pyrrha her gaze was calculating, not unfocused.

 

"I don't know if you should," she said, eventually.

 

"Huh?" Ruby blurted.

 

"I mean... I'm not sure getting together with him is the best idea, right now."

 

Pyrrha flushed, glancing down at her hands. "I wouldn't want to do anything like that until we got out of here, no. It's just... well, recent experience has shown me that I might not have as much time as I thought."

 

"That's not what I meant." She looked up, startled, and found that Blake was sitting with her arms around her knees and staring rather intensely at a point somewhere above Ruby's head. "Even if he said yes... I don't know if that would be good for you."

 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Pyrrha's voice came out a bit sharp, but she honestly couldn't see what Blake was talking about. Jaune was a great leader, and an even better friend.

 

Blake winced at the look on her face. Then she started studying the ground. "It's just... I think he's too important in your life right now."

 

Now, Pyrrha was just confused. Apparently she wasn't the only one—Yang was staring at her partner in open bafflement. "How is that a bad thing?" she asked, raising a single golden eyebrow.

 

"Um." Blake's gaze flicked from Pyrrha, to Yang, and back to the floor again. She opened her mouth, closed it again, and winced. "I told you that I had... a partner, before Beacon."

 

Pyrrha tensed. She _hadn't_ known that, and Ruby looked equally shocked, but Weiss and Yang both nodded.

 

"He was my mentor," Blake went on. Her index finger started absentmindedly tracing patterns on the rough stone beside her. "My best friend, almost like a brother. My confidant, my protector whenever a protest got violent. And... eventually..." she trailed off. Rallied.

 

"It was too much. At some point he just became _everything,_ and it made me too willing to ignore what he was doing." Yang's hands twitched, half curling into fists before relaxing again.

 

Blake turned to look at Pyrrha, and she found herself frozen in place. It was dark in the cave, dark enough that her eyes seemed to glow as they drank in what little illumination there was. Whether that was some aspect of her faunus heritage or just a trick of the light, Pyrrha had no idea, but the effect was... intense.

 

"The problem was that I didn't have anything outside of him. I was on a completely different continent from the rest of my family, and all my friends were people he'd introduced me to. Everything was built around him, and he... well, he changed. It turned out he wasn't worthy of that much trust."

 

Pyrrha shivered. The way Blake had phrased it sounded much too familiar—her family was all back in Mistral, and she _had_ met the rest of her friends through Jaune. Maybe that had been intentional. She bit her lip.

 

"I'm sorry that happened to you," she said, once she was sure her voice wouldn't crack. "But Jaune isn't like that. He's a good person." She couldn't help being a little angry at the comparison.

 

"I didn't mean Jaune isn't good enough to center your whole life around. I meant that no one is." Blake's gaze dropped to the ground again. "I'm not."

 

"Blake..." Yang murmured. "That's not—"

 

"It _is!_ I left him. It was the right thing to do, and I don't regret it... but it probably hurt him, too."

 

"So, you think I shouldn't tell him." The words came out flat, and Pyrrha couldn't muster the will to try and soften them with an apology.

 

"I—" Blake started, then stopped herself, brow furrowing as she searched for words. "Right after I left... I didn't really know what to do. It'd been a long time since I'd been on my own, and for a while I was just drifting, like I didn't have a purpose."

 

She looked up, mouth curving into a small smile. "Then... I came to Beacon. I started making friends, getting involved in a new cause. I had my _own_ purpose. And I think... that's when I started to feel better.

"I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to Jaune. I just don't think it's a good idea as long as you _need_ him. You should wait until he could say _no,_ and you'd still be okay."

 

Pyrrha was silent for a moment, struggling to absorb what Blake had said. It wasn't what she'd wanted to hear. It wasn't what she'd _expected_ to hear, either. But it touched on the silent fear that had always stopped her whenever she tried to just _tell_ him and get it over with—that maybe it would make things awkward, and destroy the sense of easy camaraderie that had made her feel so alive these past few months.

"I don't know if I agree with you," she said slowly, "but... how would you suggest I get to that point?"

 

Blake shrugged. "It's not like I'm the expert. If I'd had my way, I'd probably have spent all my free time alone in the library."

 

"Yes," Weiss replied instantly. "You would have."

 

"Hey!" Ruby pointed an indignant finger at her partner. _"You_ totally would've wasted the whole year doing homework if weren't for us!"

 

Pyrrha giggled, glad that some of the tension seemed to have dissipated. "I suppose we all found something different than we'd expected, at Beacon."

 

The others all took on speculative expressions, until Yang started grinning and said, "I think Ozpin should make that the school motto. Beacon: Different than we expected!"

 

It wasn't that funny, but the five of them all burst out laughing. The joke was a welcome break, an offer to return to lighter, safer topics. Pyrrha let it happen—she'd been given quite a lot of advice, and while she'd have to try and sort all of it out and decide on what to do at some point, she didn't need to think about it right then.

 

Still, there was something that had been bothering her for a while, now. "Blake?" she asked, when there was a lull in the conversation. "Why were you talking to Sky, earlier?"

 

Blake fidgeted uncomfortably and shrugged. "I wanted to ask him something."

 

"But... why?" The words came out a little louder than she'd intended.

 

"We already asked," Yang spoke up. "She didn't want to say." Blake shot her a grateful look, then nodded.

 

"Well, alright." Pyrrha still had at least half a hundred questions she was burning to ask, but forced herself to drop it. That wasn't to say she didn't _wonder,_ though.

 

Not long after that, all twelve of them gathered in a circle around a damp patch of stone, where the spire of ice had once been. Sky and Russel were both in the center, along with Weiss who was holding out a water bottle. It was filled all the way to the brim. Russel grabbed it, made a face, shrugged, and downed nearly a third of it before Weiss snatched it away again.

 

****

 

 

"What?" he snapped.

 

"Maybe," Weiss hissed back at him, "we should observe how toxic it is _before_ you drink an entire bottle all at once. You know, so that you don't _drop dead."_

 

After hearing _that,_ Sky took only a cautious sip before returning the water to Weiss again. He looked extremely nervous, and was sweating so much that Pyrrha suspected he might be losing more water than he drank. For a few seconds, they all stared expectantly at the two members of team CRDL, who seemed a bit put off by the attention.

 

"Well," Yang said cheerily, into the silence. "They're not dead yet. That's a good sign, right?"

 

Russel groaned and flopped onto his back. Yang looked alarmed for a moment, until he started muttering darkly under his breath. Sky, meanwhile, was prodding at his own stomach.

 

"I don't _feel_ different..." he mused. "Well... maybe a bit queasy. But I think that's nerves." Then he flushed, apparently realizing he'd just said all that out loud.

 

"You'll be fine," Dove said. He stood up, leaning heavily on the wall as he did so. "Let's go. We've been sitting around here long enough."

 

Sky hopped to his feet at once, while Russel slowly and lethargically peeled himself off the floor. Then they were moving again, hoping to cover at least another mile or two of the tunnel before they needed to sleep. It was slow going. Even Pyrrha, who had been training her endurance since she was old enough to walk, could barely put one foot in front of the other. Her head spun whenever she turned it too quickly, and her stomach felt as though it had become the home of a nest of unfriendly snakes.

 

And then, without warning, Russel bent down and emptied his stomach onto the cavern floor. Cardin yelped—a high-pitched sort of sound that someone probably would've made fun of in any other circumstances—and cursed as he tried to dodge out of the way. Some of it got on his shoes. Russel groaned and flopped down onto his hands and knees, breathing in shallow gasps. Sky stared at him in naked fear, one hand on his own stomach.

 

"Are you..." Weiss trailed off, stepping gingerly around the puddle to peer at Russel.

 

"Fuck off," Cardin snapped, bending down to haul his partner to his feet. The boy groaned, swayed, and then grabbed at the arm that was holding him up.

 

"Woah," he mumbled. "That... didn't feel good."

 

"Do you think you're going to pass out?" Sky asked. His eyes were wide, reflecting the light of Ren's scroll.

 

"No," Russel managed. "Just... really nauseous. And it feels like I swallowed a shuriken."

 

"We shouldn't drink any more," Dove said. "If it makes us throw up, we're only going to lose water even faster." Weiss nodded, looking paler than ever in the bluish light.

 

"Um, okay..." Ruby was clearly trying to sound optimistic. "So we just focus on getting above ground and finding a stream or something."

 

"Those could have contagions in them as well," Dove pointed out.

 

"I don't give a _shit_ about parasites or whatever right now," Sky groaned. "As long as it isn't going to make me puke it back—" he paused, grimacing. Then he staggered, nearly falling over. Dove caught him, then winced their combined weight fell on his ankle.

 

"Lesson learned," he said. "We should probably pour out the rest of the water."

 

"It was a good idea, though," Jaune insisted. "Even if it didn't work, it was worth trying." He smiled encouragingly at Weiss, who probably didn't notice—she'd been looking at the floor at the time. Pyrrha turned her face away. She was rather proud of the fact that she was only frowning, not outright scowling.

 

Whatever had happened to Russel and Sky, it seemed to pass over the next half hour or so. Russel muttered curses with every step he took, but he _was_ walking—unaided, in fact. They made good progress, considering two of them were ill from drinking bad water, Blake could still barely stand up straight with her injured shoulder, and Dove... well...

 

"I told you so," Sky chanted, trying his best to dance around his partner and finding his balance not quite up to the task. Instead he lurched into a wall, paused to catch his breath, and offered an arm. "C'mon. Let's..." His head drooped, then he shook it like a dog trying to rid its ears of water. "Okay, nevermind. Uh..."

 

Dove scowled at him a moment from where he'd collapsed on the ground. Then he tugged ineffectually at his boot.

 

"Are you walking around with a broken ankle?!" Weiss demanded. "We _just_ stopped for a rest, we could have tried to splint it!"

 

"It's sprained," Dove said. "Not broken."

 

"You can't walk off a sprain like that," Blake pointed out. "Trust me when I say, that only makes it worse."

 

"I am aware of that."

 

"Then why did you..." Ruby began, then trailed off when he glared at her. "Never mind."

 

Dove gave his boot another yank, yelped, and then stopped. Sighed.

 

"Want help?" Russel asked sweetly, walking up to his teammate and leaning down to rest his elbows on the other boy's shoulders. "You know, like you could have asked for hours ago? And avoided this whole mess?" He paused, tapping his chin. "I told you so too, by the way." Grumbling something very uncomplimentary under his breath, Dove stuck out his ankle.

 

"Say please," Russel prompted.

 

"Do you want me to hit you?"

 

"...No." And with that, Russel bent down and began pulling at Dove's boot.

 

"That's not—ah!—helping!"

 

"You might need to cut it off," Blake said, from a few paces in front of them. She was leaning heavily on Yang, though she seemed more lucid after their rest.

 

"The boot, or his foot?" Russel asked, grinning as if he'd just been told Christmas had come early. Then he brought out both his daggers, and made as if to start slicing. Dove grabbed his hand, looking exasperated.

 

"Just help me loosen the straps. I can't get a good angle."

 

Russel frowned, obviously disappointed, then obeyed. Eventually the boot slid off. His teammate swore at him, then gingerly tried to push himself to his feet. He fell back, wincing.

 

"Lean on Cardin," Blake ordered him curtly. "Otherwise we won't be able to move you at all." She narrowed her eyes. "That was stupid. You could've hurt yourself badly enough that we couldn't get you out of here, and now you're useless in a fight."

 

Dove glared at her, then turned to Cardin. He stared at the hand his leader was offering him as though it was covered with something slimy. They all watched the standoff for a moment, until Jaune rubbed a hand through his hair and stepped forward. Dove and Cardin both turned to stare at him. Pyrrha, too, shot him a puzzled look. He stuck out an arm. After an awkward pause, Dove grabbed his hand. Jaune pulled him to his feet.

 

She couldn't help sneaking glances at him as they continued on through the tunnel. Dove was reluctant to let Jaune support him, but as time passed the need to take the weight off his injured ankle overrode his pride. Pyrrha was struck by the image—her partner bending down a little so that his former bully could get a better grip on his shoulder, as they walked together through the dark. When Jaune noticed her looking, he grinned back a bit nervously.

 

Pyrrha swallowed and tried to focus on the ground in front of her. She felt herself floundering, barely able to keep herself from just openly _staring_ and accepting whatever happened. Conflicting pieces of advice jumbled together in her head, until she forced herself to take a deep breath and _think._

 

She didn't know what to do. She didn't _know_ what to _do,_ she'd already asked everyone for help, and, worst of all, they'd each said something _different._ Pyrrha supposed Ruby's and Nora's advice could be lumped together, since they'd both suggested that she should just tell him. That should have been simple, but... well... as much as Blake's story had made her uncomfortable, she couldn't dismiss it out of hand.

 

Pyrrha risked another peek at Jaune. He was sweating, now, partly from exertion and, she guessed, partly because of the other source of body heat hanging off his shoulder. That meant his hair was wet, some of it plastered to his forehead and some sticking up in little spikes. Ren's flashlight reflected off the moisture on his face, making his skin shine in the dark.

 

She turned away, face flushed. This was ridiculous.

 

 _I give up,_ she decided. Forget waiting until she knew who she was, forget trying to hint at him. She didn't know how to do either, but she _could_ just tell him.

 

Pyrrha glanced at him again.

 

She wouldn't be able to get the words out. Trying to think of what she might say was already tying her tongue in knots. He never _listened_ when she tried to tell him that he was good enough, how was she supposed to make him understand what he meant to her?

 

He'd pulled her back together, when she'd been reeling from their escape from the Grimm spawning pool. She'd felt so lost, and for the first time in a long time she didn't know what she was going to do. Being a huntress, something she'd always thought of as her destiny, seemed so horribly futile in the face of an undying enemy. And then, in the space of a single conversation, he'd given her back her purpose.

 

But it wasn't the same, was it? She still wanted to fight, she knew that, but not for the same reasons. As a child, she'd dreamed of being a part of humanity's fight against the darkness, of contributing in some small way to _ending_ them someday. Now, she wanted to be close to her team, and to team RWBY. And Jaune... if she were to put it bluntly, she wanted to protect that unguarded smile on her partner's face. She wanted to help him stay so... optimistic. He was tied to what she thought of as her destiny, and without him she wasn't sure what she would do.

 

What was it Blake had said? That her former partner had been too _important,_ and everything had revolved around him. He had become _,_ in some sense, her destiny. Her purpose. Pyrrha didn't know exactly what had happened, but she had the distinct impression that it had gone very, very wrong. Part of her wanted to ignore the comparison—it was Jaune, she couldn't imagine him deliberately hurting _Cardin,_ let alone someone he considered a friend. But her advice _had_ been sincere, so Pyrrha forced herself to confront the unsettling feeling in her gut.

 

Well, what _would_ she do, if Jaune suddenly decided to become, as he'd put it, a farmer or something? And, almost instantly, Pyrrha thought of Ruby. From the moment they'd seen that oily lake, she'd treated the realization that the Grimm were undying like a challenge, and one she was confident they could overcome. Then there was Nora and Ren, both somehow accepting the sheer horror of the situation with a kind of nonchalance that completely baffled her. As long as there were people in her life, even just people in the world, who still had that kind of hope... Pyrrha would have something to protect. She smiled.

 

Jaune was still a central part of what she considered her destiny. She didn't know what she'd do without his friendship, without his easy smile and laughing eyes. Maybe trying to get even _more_ of her life tangled up in his was a terrible idea that she would regret years afterward. But, Pyrrha decided... she would risk it.

At least, she would as soon as she figured out what she would say. And wrote it down. And maybe practiced a few times on Nora.


	11. Tabula Rasa

 

Sky wanted to die.

 

Well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, but he was definitely as close as he'd ever been to wanting to die. His throat and his tongue seemed to be competing to see which one could feel more like sandpaper, he was fairly sure both his stomach and his brain were stuffed with cotton balls and tissue paper, and they were all _still walking._ Nikos didn't even look _tired,_ and despite all his complaining Jaune had still been supporting most of Dove's weight for hours. Though, to be fair to himself and Russel, none of _them_ had drank toxic water.

 

"Just a little further," Ruby chirped from somewhere ahead of him. Sky didn't bother lifting his head to look at her, though he was fairly sure he'd caught Russ flipping her off out of the corner of his eye. Hopefully no one else had noticed.

 

"Why?" he croaked.

 

"Because," the Schnee said slowly, as if she were talking to an infant, "if we don't keep moving, we're never going to get out of here."

 

Russel moaned theatrically. "You're not the one who drank poison," he whined. "Or broke their ankle—"

 

"It's only sprained," Dove insisted.

 

"—or got a great hairy leg shoved through their arm," Russ continued, ignoring Dove entirely. Blake winced at his gruesome description.

 

"I'm not," Schnee replied, tone clipped, "But we're _all_ tired, Russel."

 

"Very," Jaune agreed. "Dove's heavy." He paused, then blushed. "Um, not that you're—I mean, it's all muscle, really!"

 

Dove gave him a flat look. "I'm wearing armor. Of _course_ I'm heavy."

 

"Look, we agreed to keep going until nine. It's eight forty-nine, so—"

 

"Wait, when did we decide this?" asked Russ. "Because I do _not_ agree to that. I prefer the plan where we stop and sleep."

"Nine what?" Nikos asked. "A.M. or P.M.?"

 

"Uh... lemme see... P.M."

 

"Who cares?" demanded Russel. "We're underground, it all looks the same anyway!"

 

"Going to bed when it's actually nighttime should keep us on a more normal sleep cycle," Lie explained. "Otherwise we'd have bad jet lag."

 

 _"So?!_ If I'm jet lagged in three days rather than getting my insides liquefied by a giant spider, I'll be _overjoyed!"_

 

Ruby sighed. It was a violent sigh, as if the sheer pressure of the annoyance building up inside her had forced the air out of her lungs. "It's not important _when_ we decide to stop walking, we just need to stick to it when we do! Otherwise we'll keep wanting to lay around and sleep instead of getting out of this stupid cave!"

 

"Screw this," Russel decided, and flopped down into a sitting position on the ground. "I'm done. I can't feel my feet and I think I'm going to throw up again, I'm not moving."

 

Sky looked around nervously, waiting to see what the others would do. The Schnee, rather predictably, looked _furious,_ but he could tell that Jaune and Dove were eying the ground longingly. Ruby, on the other hand, stamped her foot and pointed down the cavern.

 

"The exit could be _right there,"_ she shouted. "And you just want to sit here in the dark instead of trying to find it! Do you even _care_ if we get out of here?!"

 

Russel ignored her, choosing instead to flop down on his back and shut his eyes.

 

"Hey! Get up!" Sky cringed. He'd never actually seen her look that furious, and it was more intimidating than he'd expected.

 

"Ruby," Jaune began, "Maybe we should—"

 

"Ten minutes!" she insisted. "That's how much time is left. It's not going to kill you to keep moving for _ten more minutes!"_

 

"We should try to keep our voices down," Blake interjected. She tried to step forward, then flinched as she jarred her shoulder. Ruby opened her mouth to argue, then took a deep breath and nodded. Then she glared at Russel. The effect made Sky wince—she'd probably been learning from her partner. It was totally lost on Russ, since he couldn't see her.

 

"Unbelievable," the Schnee said, from beside her. She folded her arms and looked down her nose at him. "Do you _want_ to be stuck down here?" Russ didn't so much as twitch. He lay still on his back, face totally relaxed. Sky felt his throat tighten.

 

"Guys," he said, but Ruby was already talking over him.

 

"Fine. You've had your break. Now we can add another five minutes, and _then_ stop to sleep. Now get—"

 

"Guys!" Sky shouted. He winced as his own voice echoed off the walls around them, but he was starting to panic. "I don't think he's conscious." Everyone turned to stare at him, then rushed to check on Russel. Cardin got there first—he'd been right next to him when he sat down. He checked his partner's pulse and peeled back an eyelid.

 

For a moment, the tunnel was silent and still. Then Russel batted weakly at his partner's hand. "What are you doing," he slurred. "Get off."

 

"Are you okay?!" Ruby, who had flipped from angry to concerned so fast that Sky wondered if it had given her whiplash, rushed over to kneel beside him. "I'm so sorry, I didn't realize you were that sick—"

 

"Not sick," he groaned. "Hungry."

 

"We can't help that," Dove replied. He eased himself slowly to the floor, stretching out his injured leg with a wince. "But I suppose we could afford to rest a little early tonight." He smiled apologetically at Ruby. "It _is_ only ten minutes."

 

"We won't feel any better in the morning," Blake warned. "The hunger will only get worse, and..." she made a face as she looked at Dove. "That ankle might swell up overnight. You should keep it cold and elevated."

 

He opened his mouth to protest, then stopped. "Right. No aura."

 

"Unless you still have some left?"

 

"I wouldn't have been hurt, if I had."

 

"I didn't mean to be a tyrant or anything," Ruby said, "I just..."

 

"You don't need to apologize." Schnee folded her arms and scowled. "We _do_ need to get above ground as soon as possible. We're running out of time before our bodies stop functioning well enough to walk."

 

"Ray of sunshine," Russ muttered under his breath. Sky and Cardin both caught it, since they were sitting next to him. Blake, too, glanced at him distastefully.

 

"We should get up after about six hours," Lie suggested. "I believe the lack of sleep will be less of a hindrance than hunger or thirst. After that, we can go as long as possible before we stop for another rest."

 

Relieved, Sky plopped down on the cave floor and splayed his aching legs out in front of him. The sensation of _sitting_ after all this time was pure bliss. But then, of course, conversation turned to night watches. And Sky, as one of the few who hadn't had any yet, ended up taking the first three hours. Russel was out for the count already, and Dove was encouraged to rest as much as possible to help with his injury. That left Cardin for the second half of the night.

 

Dove tossed his bedroll at Blake's feet, to protests from her, Sky, and Russel, before grumpily colonizing the smoothest patch of rock he could. When pressed, he claimed it was because she was injured. Russel reminded him of his sprained ankle. Dove ignored him.

 

Yang's scroll was left in the middle of their 'camp.' It was face-up, with the screen casting a pale light over the pile of sleeping bodies. In an attempt to conserve battery, the flashlight was left off, but none of them had really wanted to go without it. Sky smirked to himself. They were twelve hunters-in-training. Twelve of the most dangerous teenaged warriors Vale had to offer. Twelve badasses who had unanimously agreed to sleep with a night-light.

 

Before, there had been at least an hour between the time they'd chosen to stop and rest and when they finally fell asleep. Now, when the intense discomfort that came from sleeping on the rough stone floor of the cave was overridden by exhaustion, Sky was soon the only one still awake. He listened to them all breathe for a while, leaning against the wall and struggling to keep his eyes open. His scroll, lit up and resting in his lap, illuminated one end of the tunnel. A peek at the battery revealed that it was at thirteen percent. All of team JNPR's, plus Dove's, had run out entirely.

In a rather feeble attempt to ignore the churning in his stomach—caused by equal parts anxiety and bad water—Sky glanced around the cave, then nearly jumped out of his skin. Cardin's eyes were wide open. He was curled up against the far wall of the tunnel, staring into space. After a moment he seemed to notice he was being watched, and turned to look at Sky.

 

A suffocating silence followed. Sky had expected... well, maybe he didn't think his leader would start a fight in the middle of the night, but he'd assumed the other boy would say _something._ Instead he just brooded.

 

 _One,_ Sky thought. _Four, nine, sixteen, twenty-five..._ and Cardin sat in silence.

 

Sky got all the way up to seven eighty-four before Cardin muttered, "I hate this place."

 

By that time, Sky was so used to the quiet that he jumped at the sound of another person's voice. Then he stared at Cardin. He wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that. "Me too?" he tried. There was another long pause.

 

When Cardin spoke again, his voice was oddly quiet, almost hoarse. "I hate this cave," he repeated. "I hate..." he trailed off.

 

 _You hate a lot of things,_ Sky would have pointed out, except he wasn't an idiot. Instead he said more diplomatically, "It's dark. And creepy."

 

And again, the silence stretched on. Sky squirmed where he sat, wondering why this kept happening to him. He started trying to figure out the square of twenty-nine, and had gotten as far as subtracting fifty-nine from nine-hundred when Cardin interrupted him.

 

"What are we going to do?" Sky looked up, trying to read the other boy's expression, but it was lost in shadow.

 

"What?" he blurted. Then he paused, rallied. "I guess we get the hell out of here. Then we eat our way through Beacon's cafeteria, and maybe go into hibernation for a week or two."

 

"I don't mean getting back to Beacon," Cardin grumbled. "I mean... everything."

 

"...Would you mind clarifying that a bit?"

 

"The _Grimm,_ okay?" his leader snapped. "I meant the Grimm. _Obviously."_

 

Sky cringed back against the wall, and nodded. "Oh. That."

 

"Yeah, _that."_

 

"I don't know if you should be asking me." He sighed, running a hand through his hair. "Maybe Dove. Or Jau—" he stopped mid-word and swallowed nervously.

 

"Right," Cardin snorted. "Then they'll treat me to a big speech about hope that isn't worth shit outside whatever fantasy world they cooked up in their heads."

 

"That's not—" Sky started to say, but Cardin's glower cut him off. He groaned. "I don't _know,_ okay? It's not like a speech about how we're all _fucked_ is going to be more helpful." He _would_ have suggested talking to Blake, because commiserating with her had been surprisingly therapeutic, but... well, that could only end in blood. Probably Cardin's.

 

"I already got their spiel, alright? I can't see how yours could be any worse."

 

 _Why me?!_ Sky wanted to scream. He didn't, but only because he didn't want to wake everyone up. Instead, he put his face in his hands and made a vague, muffled noise that didn't mean much of anything. "Fine," he said eventually. "The way I see it, the Grimm are probably going to overwhelm Vale. I don't know when it'll happen, but since some _idiot_ decided it would be a good idea to build an entire kingdom fifty miles away from the Grimm spawn point—"

 

"The what?"

 

"Spawn point?" Sky's fingers drummed anxiously against his boot. "It's a video game thing."

 

"You are _such_ a nerd." Sky flushed.

 

Cardin was silent again for a while, long enough for Sky to finish his subtraction and come up with eight hundred forty-one. Then, "You were right. That _was_ worse than Dove." Sky shrugged helplessly.

 

Another pause. Sky already knew thirty squared was nine hundred, so he started trying to figure out thirty-one. _Nine hundred plus sixty-two minus one... Nine hundred sixty-one._

 

"You know what the worst thing is?"

 

"What?"

 

"It's like they don't even _care."_ Cardin glanced at their sleeping classmates. "Like all the other idiots aren't even losing sleep."

 

"Blake is," Sky replied instantly, without even thinking about it. Then he froze, watching Cardin cautiously.

 

"So?" Cardin scoffed. "So _what?_ Just because some filthy—"

 

"Don't, okay?" Sky squeaked. It was supposed to sound more defiant than that, but he'd lost his nerve halfway through. "I mean, um... look, she's obviously the same brand of heroic lunatic as everyone else at this school, if she was on that train at the Breach. So it _means_ something, if she's scared."

"Whatever," Cardin grunted, after a moment. "But... I mean, look at Ren and Nora! It didn't take more than half an hour for her to be acting like an overgrown toddler again, and I'm not even sure he even noticed. And _Jaune..."_ he spat the last word, with more heat and venom in his tone than Sky had been expecting. He flinched, wishing Dove were awake. This was dangerous territory, now.

 

"It seems like Nora is just trying to cheer us up," he said carefully. "And Jaune... he can be kind of naive."

 

"Kind of?!" Cardin demanded. His hands clenched into fists as he trembled with rage. "He's weak," he hissed, spraying spittle all over the cave floor. His voice was low, so as not to wake the others— _especially Nikos, of course_ —but pitch rose when volume could not. "He's been a complete waste of space all year, and the _one_ time he decides to grow a pair..." he trailed off. "I'm strong! He's just _pathetic."_

 

Sky was staring at him. He knew it would only make Cardin angrier, but he couldn't help himself. _Pathetic?_ He remembered the fight with the Ursa—or, to be more accurate, he remembered running like hell and leaving Cardin behind. He'd felt like throwing up afterward, he'd been so disgusted with himself, and when he'd finally screwed up his courage to apologize it had all come spilling out—what a coward he was, how he couldn't promise he wouldn't do it again because that was who he _was,_ that the whole point of coming to Beacon was to get braver.

 

Cardin had laughed and called him a crazy idiot, but his tone had been more amused and admiring than angry. He'd punched him on the shoulder, too, which had kind of hurt, but Sky had spent the whole next day feeling like he was walking on air. Cardin had forgiven them, or at least that's what he'd said. _But if_ Jaune _is pathetic, what the hell are we?_

 

"How do you mean, strong?" Sky asked, after a moment. It was the only part of what Cardin had just said that he felt even remotely capable of dealing with.

 

"I'm a fighter," he said casually, as though it were obvious. "I'm bigger, I'm _better..._ I was always... and then _Pyrrha..."_ He scowled, his expression curdling into something downright murderous—and Sky understood. Nikos had beaten all four of them by herself. Russ had been livid and champing at the bit for a rematch, while Dove and Sky were both quietly unsurprised, but Cardin... he'd fallen into a foul mood that had lasted months.

 

Even before that, everyone had accepted that Nikos was the best fighter in their class. Everyone, that was, except Cardin, who would often loudly boast that he could take her with one hand tied behind his back. He'd never volunteered to fight her, though, until he'd been dragged into it by the randomizer and been _crushed_. And that, Sky realized with a sick feeling in his stomach, was when he'd started taking a special interest in Jaune.

 

The boy belonged to Nikos, in a sense. Cardin couldn't get at her directly, not when she was stronger than him. So he'd gone after her partner. _Like the playground bully taking away the other children's toys,_ he thought. _Except, you know, with people._ His mind made the obvious connection—was that what _he_ was, too? A proxy to hit, in order to get at Dove?

 

He could feel his expression souring but he couldn't really help it. Instead he turned to Cardin, anger rising until he felt... sort of numb. One finger tapped an irregular rhythm against his boot, and part of his mind was already frothing at the mouth, spitting horrible curses at the boy in front of him... but he was afraid. So he sat, seething, as he watched Cardin contort his face into a sneer.

 

Sky had been feeling like such an asshole for _days_ now, he'd spent his whole _life_ feeling like he wasn't brave enough or that he was too much of a nerd. It was who he was, he couldn't help it—but _Cardin,_ the boy who'd actively caused all the bullying to stroke his ego, the one who'd blackmailed Jaune just to hurt Pyrrha because he was too _pathetic_ to confront her, he was _still_ convinced he was _the gods' gift to humanity._

 

It had been funny, when they'd first arrived at Beacon. He'd been charmed by Cardin's swaggering walk, the way he acted however he damn well pleased without, it seemed at the time, a single thought to what anyone else might think of him. Sky had _craved_ that kind of confidence... but it had turned out to be nothing more than a flimsy shell painted over a quagmire of insecurity, and now he felt for the first time in his life like he might want to _punch_ another human being.

 

Cardin was still smirking. Now that Sky was looking at it with a fresh eye, it seemed... brittle. Like a thin layer of ice across a frozen lake, just as it was starting to make threatening creaking noises.

 

"Don't, Cardin," Sky managed, as soon as his anger had ebbed to the point where he could speak civilly. "Just... don't."

"What?" Cardin folded his arms over his chest and posed, chin pointed arrogantly.

 

"Don't lie to yourself." Sky paused for a moment, _horrified_ by what he'd just said and how much trouble it was going to get him into.

 

"I'm _not!"_ Cardin shot back, voice rising. They both froze, looking around at their sleeping classmates. Blake stirred, one feline ear flicking in her sleep... but either she was as heavy a sleeper as the rest of them, or she was just _that_ exhausted.

 

Sky bit back the first retort that popped into his head— _Why are you near the bottom of the rankings, then?—_ and said instead, "What makes you the strongest?" He cringed. That _still_ wasn't a good way to phrase it, but he'd never been good at placating angry people, not even his brother.

 

Yet, still, Cardin didn't hit him. It seemed that he was too preoccupied by whatever was going on in his head to notice that Sky was, as he'd put it, _giving him lip._ Russel did it all the time, but between the two of them vicious insults were more like small talk.

 

It took a while for Cardin to speak. Then, finally, "I don't know. I was the best fighter in my whole town, even the _teachers_ couldn't beat me, but... the matches haven't been _fair,_ here, they always... they..." he trailed off, fists clenching. "It's _bullshit,"_ he burst out, clearly struggling to keep his voice low. "All she knows is _tournaments,_ I bet she'd get her ass handed to her in a real fight!"

 

Sky was having a bit of trouble following all this, but he could guess who Cardin was referring to easily enough. "Cardin..." he said carefully, like he was approaching a wounded rhinoceros and didn't want to get gored to death. "It's _Nikos._ I don't think anyone in our year could beat her. A whole _world_ full of tournament fighters have been trying to win against her for something like four years, now, and none of them have managed it."

 

"That's _tournaments,"_ Cardin insisted. "In a real fight you don't have rules like that."

 

"Yeah," Sky allowed, "But... I doubt it would make _that_ much of a difference. She's still one of, if not _the_ best fighter in our generation. Comparing yourself to her isn't healthy."

 

"You think she's better than me!" Cardin hissed. "Look, just because you idiots were holding me back during our fight—"

 

"You knocked Dove out!" Sky blurted, incredulous.

 

"He got in my _way!"_ Cardin hissed. He got to his feet, face morphing into a scowl, and Sky found himself backpedaling frantically. He'd done it, he'd pushed too far, and now—

 

"Okay!" he found himself whispering. "Okay, you're right, I'm sorry!" Cardin glared at him, grabbed his ear, and _twisted._ Sky bit back a yelp and tried to pull away, but that only made it hurt worse. His leader held on to him for a moment, then let go. He was free to rub at the side of his head, whimpering.

 

 _"You_ don't get to talk to me," Cardin growled into his ear. "When was the last time _you_ won a match in sparring?!"

 

Sky ducked his head, heart hammering as he blinked back tears. It had been, if he remembered right, the first time he'd fought Jaune. This was back when the school year first started, when the other boy had barely known which end of the sword to hold. Their most recent fight had been completely one-sided, and not at all in Sky's favor.

 

"You're just like Jaune," he went on. Sky glanced desperately towards Dove, but he didn't stir. Should he shout, wake him up? Cardin would be furious... "Some sniveling little _weakling_ who never should have been here in the first place. What gives you the right to run your mouth?!"

 

To his horror, Sky felt the start of tears and a burning in his throat. The only reason he'd even gotten in to Beacon was his academic results, he was certain. He'd gotten a message telling him he was one of the top five scorers, though it didn't say how well he'd placed apart from that. It had made him flush with pride, but once he'd actually shown up... he'd realized just how badly he matched up to the rest of his class in combat. Book smarts were virtually useless in the ring, as he'd learned over and _over_ for the past few months.

 

"What, are you gonna _cry?"_ Cardin grabbed a fistful of his shirt, his gauntlet scraping against Sky's breastplate. "Useless."

 

This time, there was a flash of anger alongside the terror and humiliation. He was shit at combat—that was just a _fact._ But at least _he_ had academics to balance it out. What was Ozpin _smoking_ when he let in Cardin?!

 

Unfortunately, Sky had never had a very good poker face. "The hell are you looking at?" his leader jeered, lifting him an inch off the ground. "Finally ready to grow a _spine,_ Lark?"

His entire body was trembling, his eyes had squeezed themselves shut and there were tears running down his cheeks and dripping off his chin. And then, he remembered forever fall. How Jaune had looked, hanging from Cardin's arm in just the same way, with that strangely peaceful look on his face.

 

 _This is it,_ he thought at himself. _You shook on it._

 

"So this makes you strong?" he asked, voice cracking. "Beating on the ones who won't fight back, like me and Velvet? Hurting Jaune, because you're scared of Nikos?" He shut his eyes, face screwing up as he prepared for the punch.

It never came. Instead, he felt the hand on his shirt loosen its grip, and nearly fell over when his feet hit the ground again. When he looked up, he realized that Cardin had stumbled back, eyes huge.

 

"That's not..." he began, then trailed off. Then he scowled. "He needed to know his place, she had nothing to do with it. Fucking _Jaune,_ who does he think he is?!"

 

Sky stared, mouth gaping open, as Cardin unraveled before his eyes.

 

"He's just some wannabe, didn't even apply like we did! He wouldn't still _be_ here if Pyrrha didn't feel sorry for him, he's _nothing!"_ Cardin started to pace as he ranted, though he kept his voice low. The others, exhausted as they were, slept on.

 

"Look, Cardin—" Sky started to say, but Cardin cut him off. There was a wild look in his eyes, now.

 

"Then, the fucking _world_ turns out to be ending," he spat, fists clenching, "and he just gives a big speech about hope like it doesn't... like he isn't..."

 

Sky wished his mouth hadn't fallen open, earlier. It left him with nowhere to go—his jaw was starting to ache from the sheer force of his own shock, like it had taken physical form and lodged itself between his teeth. Cardin... Cardin was _crying._

 

"Uh..." He had no idea what to say. He had _no idea_ what to _say!_

 

"Oh, shut up," Cardin tried to snarl, but it came out as more of a hiccup. He wiped furiously at his face, hand drifting toward his mace as if he were already considering silencing the only witness.

 

"He probably is," Sky said quietly, after a moment. "Scared, I mean."

 

"Doesn't fucking look like it."

 

"Blake definitely is. I talked to her, before."

 

"I noticed. The fuck _was_ that, anyway?"

 

"She wanted to ask me something." He briefly considered telling Cardin about her theory, before deciding that his leader's pride probably couldn't take another blow right now. He wouldn't like the idea of the Grimm keeping them alive on purpose, not at _all._ "It's private."

 

Cardin slumped bonelessly against the cave wall. "Great. Real helpful."

 

"I don't know what you want me to do, Cardin. If I knew how _not_ to be afraid... I wouldn't be."

 

"Fuck."

 

Sky realized his hands were shaking, and his blood was pulsing in his ears. _Thirty-two squared,_ he thought. That was nine hundred plus thirty-two times four, so one twenty-eight... minus four. One thousand twenty-four. That made sense, it was one of those powers of two he kept seeing—

 

He was cut off abruptly when he heard a quiet hiccup from across the tunnel. Cardin was biting down on his own sleeve, tears and snot and probably some saliva soaking into his shirt. _Pathetic, huh? There's a lot of that going around lately._

****

 

 

"Cardin..." he said gently.

 

"Shut up." It was more desperate than threatening, and for once in his life Sky didn't think he was scared at all. Cardin would've been livid if he knew _that._

 

"It's _okay_ to be afraid. At least, something like this... the only reason the others _aren't_ terrified out of their minds is that... well, they're Beacon students. I still think being batshit crazy is some kind of requirement, and we just slipped through the cracks."

 

"I'm not!" Cardin choked out. "I... I..."

 

_Oh, just stop being such a stubborn—_

 

Sky's train of thought was  jerked to a sudden halt as Cardin moaned, "I don't know anymore! I'm supposed to be strong."

 

All the fight seemed to have gone out of him. He slumped against the cave wall, and he was starting to sniffle again. "I don't know what to do," he admitted. "What am I, now?"

 

"Tabula Rasa."

 

"What?" Cardin tried to glare at him, but it looked more pleading than anything else.

 

"It means blank slate," Sky explained. "It's like... if you don't want to be who you are, you think about who you _do_ want to be, and... move towards that. Do whatever you can to be better. Like your self is a blank piece of paper, and you can write whatever you want on it."

"Like what?" Cardin spat. "No matter what I do, Pyrrha doesn't even have to _try_ to beat me."

 

Sky sighed, letting a little of his exasperation show. "Not like _that._ I mean... things like being braver, or a better person. Not fighting." _Though training once and a while wouldn't hurt, Cardin._

 

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

 

"You could have value, even if it isn't all based on combat. You could be... a good friend, maybe? Or the kind of huntsman who would defend a village, even if he might die?"

 

Now, Cardin's brows were knitted together, as if in thought. "I don't know what I'd want to be. I'm the strong one. That's how it is."

 

 _Not anymore._ "Well, if you could be anyone—I mean, a real person, someone we know, or someone on television, who would you be?"

 

His leader's eyes narrowed as though he suspected a trap, but he seemed to actually consider the question. "There's something..."

 

"Yes?"

 

Cardin made a face. "It's not... I mean, it's not a person."

 

"Anything works."

"Jaune told me something, after Dove..." he stopped, shoulders slumping. Then he rallied. "He said that I was responsible for my team, whether I liked it or not, and I should be the best leader I could. I wasn't allowed to be a failure."

 

Sky blinked, startled. "Well, yeah. That's pretty much what I was talking about."

 

"I don't know how," he groaned, wiping at his nose with one sleeve.

 

"Get help?" Sky shrugged. "If I knew how to be a great leader, I'd have been picked at the beginning of the year." Although, he secretly thought Dove would have been better at the job than Cardin. And... well, Ozpin _had_ picked the youngest girl in their grade and the least competent student possibly in the history of the school to lead the other two teams. Dove had suggested on multiple occasions that the simplest explanation might just be that the headmaster had been drunk at the time. Sure, that mug of his looked and smelled like coffee, but you never knew what he'd added to it.

 

Cardin shook his head. "I can't—" he started, then rubbed a hand through his hair. "I'm not going to _Jaune."_ There was a stubborn cast to his jaw. It made him seem a bit less like a wreck of himself, but it was also incredibly annoying.

 

"Then ask Ruby," Sky suggested, exasperated. "Or a teacher, or one of the older students." _Just not Adel, she might break something important._

 

Cardin looked as though he were about to argue again, but seemed to give up halfway through. Instead, he flopped into a sitting position. "It's been three hours, right?" he asked suddenly. Sky blinked at the change of subject.

 

"A little less than one, actually," Sky corrected, as he fiddled with his scroll. "Why?"

 

"I can't sleep," he grumbled.

 

"Try counting sheep," Sky said helpfully. Cardin glowered.

 

"Just because you helped me, doesn't mean you can go around being a smartass all the time."

 

"You want to be a good leader, right?" Sky asked, grinning. "That means you have to listen to your subordinates." He held his breath, hardly daring to hope. It had taken him a while, but he'd started to suspect that something had _broken_ in Cardin, during the mess in Forever Fall. Something like this would've gotten him a laugh and a punch on the shoulder their first week of school, and a hard backhand in the days since the Breach.

 

This new Cardin, if that was what he was, did neither. Instead he just waved his hand in an irritated sort of way and leaned back against the wall. The tension of their conversation drained from Sky all at once, and something that had been coiled up deep in his guts for weeks now unraveled at the same time, leaving him feeling a bit like a puddle of goo. He knew it wouldn't last—in fact he fully expected to be an anxious mess again by tomorrow.

_Fuck it,_ he thought. _Good enough._

Sky was so relaxed, in fact, that he dozed off during his watch. The only reason he even noticed, since his grasp on time had been tenuous at best for the past few days, was that he had another nightmare. The memory was nearly gone by the time he woke, leaving him with a cloying sense of dread that he couldn't quite place. He shuddered, collected himself, and stood. Cardin was staring down one end of the tunnel, scroll in hand. He didn't notice Sky until he turned to survey the other side.

 

"How long was I asleep?" Sky asked, wiping cold sweat off his brow. His hair was sticking to his face, and if he weren't so distracted by his hunger and thirst he might have found the grunginess of his own body unbearable.

 

"I was just about to wake everyone up," Cardin grunted. His eyes were still mostly focused, though Sky realized all of a sudden that the bags under them were almost as pronounced as Blake's. He lurched to his full and rather impressive height, stretched, and groaned. Then he took a deep breath and called, "Hey! It's morning!"

 

Blake awoke with a jerk, wild-eyed and panting. The rest were sluggish, and Russ unloaded half a thesaurus' worth of unspeakable curses in Cardin's general direction. Sky was fairly sure some of them were in other languages, though that might just have been his slurred speech.

 

"Ren..." Nora croaked, pushing herself into a sitting position. "Why?" Her hair was sticking up in every conceivable direction, and her arms were stretched straight out in front of her like a zombie.

 

"What did I do?" he asked mildly, rubbing his eyes.

 

"We should only sleep six hours," Yang mimicked, still flat on her back and giving no indication that she might move any time soon. "Sound familiar?"

 

"Look, let's just start walking so we can—" Blake began, moving as though to get to her feet. But, the moment her shoulder shifted, she let out a pained hiss and froze.

 

"Let me see," Weiss murmured, leaning over to inspect the wound. "Oh..." Sky craned his neck to see, and winced at the sight of the bite mark. It had turned an angry red during the night.

 

Blake winced at the look on her friend's face. "It's infected, isn't it?"

 

"What do we do?" Ruby blurted, suddenly wide awake and hovering over her teammate. "Why did they never teach us about infections?!"

 

"We learn that next year," Weiss said.

 

Russel snorted. "Real fucking helpful. Remind me why we have Pete's class instead of first-aid, again?"

 

"The only reason this came up in the first place is that we ran out of aura and provisions," Dove pointed out. "And there's no use arguing about it _now."_

 

"But what do we _do?"_ repeated Ruby, chewing anxiously on her lip.

 

Blake, who looked a bit put off by all her teammates fussing over her, sighed. "It'll be fine. We just need to get out of here so we can eat and replenish our auras. If that doesn't get rid of it, I can get antibiotics from the infirmary."

 

"For now, we can redress it." Weiss took the roll of bandages from Dove and set about winding fresh sling around her injured arm. Yang, meanwhile, grabbed her free hand. Sky initially thought it was for moral support, until he noticed that Blake's knuckles had gone white. She was probably squeezing it to alleviate the pain.

"We should go," Dove said, as soon as they were done. "This could get serious without treatment." He hauled himself to his feet, swore, and stumbled. Sky leapt forward to try and catch him, and nearly fell over when all of his partner's weight came down on his shoulder.

 

"I told you so," Russel repeated from the floor. Sky and Dove both turned to glare at him.

 

"Yes, you did." Dove limped forward a few steps, then cursed again.

 

"Come on," Cardin grunted. He ducked under Dove's other arm and started walking. Sky glanced nervously at his partner, but he only made a face and said nothing.

 

"Well, we're a mess." Yang hopped to her feet, stretched, then smiled apologetically at Blake as she offered her a hand.

 

Soon enough they were hobbling along, with Dove holding onto Sky and Cardin—Sky suspected he was carrying most of the weight, because his partner kept trying to lean away from their leader—and Blake gritting her teeth and grimacing with every step.

 

It wasn't exactly one of the heroic charges he'd read about in stories. Even when heroes were injured, they usually ended up persevering against staggering odds or battling through the pain. Great sagas never really mentioned _slogging_ through the pain. Every single step was grueling, but eventually it became a dull habit. Sky lost track of just _what_ was making his whole body ache, whether it was thirst or hunger or tiredness, and became utterly hypnotized by Weiss' ponytail as it swayed back and forth in front of him like a sinister silver pocket watch. Dove's shoulderguard was digging into the side of his neck.

 

No one even noticed the light, at first. Sky's eyes were fixed firmly on the ground, and had been since Weiss had turned around and _glared_ at him, so all he saw was rough stone passing slowly between his feet. Then, just as he was lifting his foot to take another wretched step, Blake gasped.

 

She'd been doing that a lot, whenever a patch of rough ground made her stumble and jar her shoulder, but something about the pitch or tone made Sky look up. He didn't notice anything different, but he could see that her ears had stood straight and were straining towards the tunnel ahead. Dread settled in his gut, and his free hand strayed toward his halberd. Dove grunted, fingers twitching as though he wanted to draw his sword, before he slumped back into a pained daze. But, just as Sky was tensing for a fight, Blake laughed.

 

"It's the sun," she whispered, awed.

 

"What?" several voices blurted at once. The second Sky processed what she'd said he turned his head towards her feet. He might have been imagining it, but he thought he saw the ghost of a shadow stretching out behind her, while Russ held the light somewhere in the back of the group.

 

Then, finally, they came to a sharp turn in the cave. The passage narrowed as it went, to the point where Sky and Cardin couldn't stand to either side of Dove. He had to crawl, in the end—they all did, Blake with barely any complaint except a few sharp intakes of breath.

 

All their walking earlier had passed in a dull torpor, but now every inch was charged with anticipation. Sky watched as the oppressive darkness began to thin. Finally, it fell away entirely as he emerged, blinking, into a quiet clearing.

 

He looked up, rapturous, taking in the birdsong and the rustling of the trees, the smell of earth and sun and fresh air. The leaves were a lush, verdant green, speaking of water and life and clean growing things. Sky blinked hard, then belatedly shuffled out of the way and helped Dove up and into the light. His partner squinted even more than he usually did, putting up a hand to shade his eyes as he sat sprawled in the dirt. The smile started slowly, teasing at the corners of his mouth as he craned his neck to stare at the branches above them, at the nettle-strewn ground, at the great fluffy white clouds. And then, softly, Dove began to laugh.


	12. No Better Place

 

Blake barely even registered the sun on her face until she was face-down in the dirt. Her cheek pressed against grass so soft and springy that she felt like she was lying on a carpet, and when her eyes opened it was to the glory of the forest around her, vibrant and full of life.

 

Then her head fell back to earth with a thud, and a wave of nausea and dizziness washed over her. She made a pained noise somewhere between a yelp and a whimper. All three of her teammates were hovering over her in an instant, with Yang going so far as to pull her head into her lap. It was softer than the ground, Blake supposed, though the change between the nice earthy scent of the grass and the smell of shorts that hadn't been washed in nearly a week of underground exploration wasn't as pleasant.

 

Finally, when her stomach and head had both stopped churning, Blake struggled back into a sitting position. Yang did most of the work, but after a few deep breaths she was both upright and mostly alert. Dove was laughing, though whether out of relief or because of something Sky or Russel had said, Blake couldn't tell. Her head was still aching, and the searing sunlight wasn't helping. And yet... they'd made it. They were out in the open air and they were _still alive._

 

She breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of trees and dirt, letting her ears catch the light breeze. Slowly, she felt her body beginning to relax, tension she hadn't even known was there leaving her all at once. Her ears flicked back and forth, unrestricted in open air for the first time in months. Blake let her mind drift as she listened to the wind, the few quiet murmurs of her classmates, the faint and distant sound of a babbling brook...

 

Blake shot upright, eyes widening. Her mouth, which by now was so dry that she could hardly swallow, tingled in anticipation. The others turned to stare at her, all going for their weapons. From the grim sets of their faces, they were expecting the worst. This time, at least, she could be the bearer of good news.

 

"I hear running water," she said, not even bothering to try to hide the huge grin spreading across her face. Most of them were upright and cheering before she'd even finished her sentence.

Their progress was slow, as Dove was limping along with the aid of a tree branch he'd scavenged off the ground and Blake was still leaning on Yang, but compared to their aimless slog through the caves, it was invigorating. Ruby kept skipping ahead, only to stop and wait for the others while bouncing on the balls of her feet. Nora and Russel started to do the same after a while. And, when the stream Blake had heard finally came into view between the brilliant green leaves of the trees, the three of them raced towards it.

 

Ruby won, to no one's surprise. But, when Russel caught up to her, he didn't stop—he raced right ahead and leapt into the water, laughing and splashing it at her. She squeaked, bringing up an arm to shield her face.

 

"It's cold!" she giggled.

 

"Cannonball!" Nora shouted, voice cracking but enthusiasm just as formidable as ever. Ren caught her by the arm, pointing out that the water almost definitely wasn't deep enough for that.

 

By the time Blake and Yang reached the stream, the others were already drinking from their cupped hands or, in Russel's case, dunking their heads under the water and taking great gulps. Blake had to cling to Yang as they leaned toward the stream, so that she didn't overbalance and fall in. Then she let her partner hold her up, because she needed her good arm free in order to scoop up some of the water. She sipped slowly, letting it swirl around in her mouth. It was crisp and clean, and so cold her mouth went numb. None of it even made it down her throat, the first time—it was all absorbed by her cracked lips, her dry tongue. Slowly, steadily, she rehydrated herself as best she could, and then leaned back with a sigh of total contentment. It was, without a doubt, the best thing she'd ever tasted.

 

"Should we be worried about how clean this is?" Ruby wondered—this somewhere between her tenth and twelfth handful.

 

"Running water is generally safer," Weiss supplied, "and I think a colder temperature is a good sign. We're fine. Probably."

 

"Don't care," Sky groaned. He'd torn off all his armor and now lay on his back across the rocks, letting the water cascade over him. "So good..."

 

"If you get pneumonia," said Russel, "I _will_ say 'I told you so.' Just warning you."

 

"You're soaked too, so shut up."

 

Ruby, who had been watching Sky with a bemused look on her face, fumbled for her scroll. "I'll call the professors," she decided. "I was going to do it earlier, but then we went for water."

 

Weiss and Yang both leaned in on either side of Ruby, and since her partner was supporting something like three quarters of Blake's weight, she too found herself crowding into the frame as the request for a video call to Ozpin was made. The scroll rang once, twice. And then…

 

"Miss Rose!" Ozpin was half-risen from his chair, his hair and clothes unusually disheveled.

 

"Um, hi!"

 

From somewhere to the left of the frame, Professor Goodwitch emerged all at once. Her eyes were bloodshot, but her gaze held all its usual ferocity as she _glared_ at them.

 

"Miss _Rose,"_ she snapped—it was a marvel how different the same two words could sound, with just a slight change in inflection. "Where are you?! Are teams Juniper and Cardinal with you?"

 

"We're all here, professor!" Pyrrha called over their shoulders. The others were inching into frame behind them, craning their necks to get a better view.

 

"I know we're in the Emerald Forest," Ruby added, "But we have no idea where."

 

"Well," Goodwitch huffed. Her gaze had, if anything, _sharpened._ "I would love to know which part of _'Be careful and do not venture too far underground,'_ was lost in translation. It has been three days! What happened?!"

 

Blake caught herself leaning closer to Yang without even realizing, hiding her face behind her partner. The wound on her shoulder was throbbing, and her headache only worsened at the sound of Goodwitch's voice.

 

"Well, we did what you said and investigated carefully," Jaune hedged, "But then a bunch of Grimm came from the ceiling, so..."

 

"Came from the—" their professor began, but fell silent when Ozpin raised a hand.

 

"There will be time for the full story at a later date," he decided. "For now, keep your scroll on. We should be able to track it to your location and send an airship. Until then, do not move. I will have to find—"

 

There was a click from somewhere behind him, and an unfamiliar gruff voice said, "No luck, Oz. If there's another entrance, it's small enough to—who's on the line?"

 

"Uncle Qrow!" Ruby and Yang called out, at almost the same time. A third face emerged into their field of view, with spiky grey hair and a broad grin. He looked terrible, though that might have been a symptom of how long they'd been missing—his chin was covered in dark stubble, and there were rings under his deep red eyes.

 

"Hey, squirt," he greeted them. Somewhere over their shoulders, Russel sniggered. "I was wondering when you'd turn up."

 

"Aw, we know you missed us!" Yang stuck her tongue out for good measure. 'Uncle Qrow' opened his mouth to reply, but Ozpin coughed politely and took the scroll back from him.

 

"I'm afraid I need to cut this short. Remember, you _are_ still in the Emerald Forest. You cannot lower your guard just yet."

 

"Got it!" Ruby saluted at the screen, nearly dropping her scroll while she was at it.

 

"Good. And... I am glad to see you are all safe." The call ended, and the screen went dark.

 

"So," Yang said, after a moment. "What do we do now?"

 

"Try not to die." Russel hopped to his feet, wearing a sardonic grin. "Going through all that and then snuffing it when we're practically in the school's backyard? That'd just be embarrassing." Blake smirked. The dark humor didn't pare well with the way his wet hair was sticking up in every direction, as though he had grass growing out of his head.

 

Still, he had a point. None of them wanted to fight off any more Grimm, but Weiss helpfully offered to keep watch for them while they sat by the stream. Blake suspected this was mostly because she knew full well that if she stayed anywhere near Yang and Ruby while they were by the water, she'd end up getting splashed. Which, considering the fact that Yang pushed Ruby into the creek only seconds after Weiss left, and Ruby pulled Yang in after her, was probably wise.

 

Blake ended up with a damp patch on her vest in the first few minutes the two sisters spent in the stream, but after that they made sure to leave her out of the crossfire. Sky and Russel both waded in as well, though Russel seemed more interested in lying on his back than splashing anyone and Sky only ever aimed at him and Dove. And, of course, Nora inevitably tackled Ren into the water. Blake was just far enough away to avoid getting wet, which may or may not have been intentional on Nora's part.

 

Rather than wading in herself, Blake chose to strip off her boots and socks and let the water flow over her bare feet. It was freezing cold, but refreshing. To her surprise, Dove soon wandered over to sit... well, not _next_ to her, there was a solid three feet of space between them, but definitely in her general vicinity. She shot him a sidelong glare, and to her surprise he lowered his eyes to stare at his shoes.

 

"What?" she demanded, after letting him stew in silence for a while.

 

"Thank you," he mumbled.

 

"What?" This time, she was baffled rather than annoyed. Was he _always_ like this?

 

"Thank you," he repeated. "I don't know what you said to Sky, but he seems better. A little, anyway. I wanted to say... I owe you for that."

 

Blake felt her mouth drop open. "Are you serious?" she asked, peering at his face and searching for any hint of a trick. He stared back—at least, she thought he did. It was hard to see his eyes, which was actually a bit disconcerting now that she was trying to read his expression.

 

"Yes. I don't know how to pay you back, but... well, anything within reason."

 

"Three days ago, you were telling me you thought I should act like an animal because of what I am. Why should I believe _anything_ you say?"

 

He shrugged. "I don't really care if you do or not. You got along with Sky, so..." Dove got to his feet and turned to go.

 

"Wait!" He stopped, cocking his head to the side. It was the same thing he'd done the last time she'd spoken to him, and it was just as unnerving now as it was then. Too similar to Yang and Ruby, coming from the likes of him.

 

Blake sighed. "You said anything within reason." Slowly, perhaps reluctantly, he nodded.

 

"Give us a chance." When he furrowed his brows in confusion, Blake continued, "Whenever you meet a faunus, just treat them like you would anyone else. See if there's any truth to what you think."

 

"That's it?"

 

"That's it."

 

Another shrug, and he wandered off to where Sky was knee deep in the creek, staring at the pair of them with an expression bordering on panic. He seemed to relax as Dove moved away from her, and eventually went back to playing in the water.

 

Blake watched them for several minutes. There was something relaxing about it, even though she wasn't taking part. Ruby was sitting in the deepest part of the stream, wearing a dopey smile as she made ripples in the water in front of her. There was no hint of the expression being forced—it reached all the way to her eyes.

 

Maybe it was the sun. Things seemed better now that she could feel it on her shoulders and back, despite the fact that nothing had really changed. Every breath of warm, clean air seemed like it was clearing a little more of the fog from her mind, bringing the light in. And yet...

 

_They're right under our feet._ Even then, as Ruby and Yang were giggling and splashing in the stream, as Nora was slicking Ren's hair into spikes and Pyrrha and Jaune were relaxing next to one another in the dappled sunshine, the Grimm they'd fought would be reemerging. Crawling from the depths, slinking down that same passageway, heading for the open air. Would they remember the hunters that had killed them?

 

Whether they did or not, they were still _there._ Millions of them, seething in the dark in the depths of the earth. It was a constant threat hanging over their heads, one that had gone unnoticed for _centuries,_ and now... now they'd never be able to forget about it. Never be able to unlearn that, in a war between humanity and the Grimm, there was only one possible conclusion.

 

Feeling sick, Blake struggled to her feet. She didn't want to look at the sweet scene before her anymore—not when she kept imagining that lake, with one of the massive Spiders they'd fought pulling itself free one spindly leg at a time. Her shoulder twinged as she stood, but she struggled onward a few paces.

 

"Where are you going?" Ruby called after her. Blake glanced over her shoulder, wincing at the naked concern on her leader's face.

 

"I'll help keep watch." Blake tried to smile, but Ruby seemed unconvinced. Still, she didn't press.

 

"Stay close to Weiss, okay?"

 

Blake nodded, feeling a little guilty. She didn't want to talk to Weiss just now—she didn't really want to talk to anyone. Of course, she also didn't want to _die,_ so she'd be sure to stay within human earshot of the rest of their group, but something told her that wasn't what Ruby had meant.

 

Resolving to make it up to her later, somehow, Blake turned and disappeared into the trees. The foliage around her made her feel calmer—it was dangerous, she knew, but a kind of danger she was used to. Familiar. That was a bit sad, if she really thought about it.

 

After a few minutes of blindly wandering around, Blake's shoulder began to burn and she seated herself on a small stone jutting out of the ground. It reminded her of a similar rock she'd been perched on in another forest, just before she and Adam robbed a train. She swallowed, curling into herself as much as her wounded arm would allow.

 

_We need to know why._ The thought came to her all of a sudden, and she hugged herself around the middle with her good arm. The only way to keep themselves alive, as a civilization, would be to figure out _why_ the monsters in the dark seemed inclined to let them live. How else would they make sure things _stayed_ that way?

 

What if it _was_ for food, though? And then, if they found out, they'd be essentially _feeding_ innocent people to the Grimm. To know was to be complicit. Her head began to ache, and she thought rather suddenly back to one night in the cave, when Sky had said that he was counting squares in his head. _It helps me relax._

 

She knew the first few. One, four, nine, sixteen, twenty-five... but when it came to eleven, she got stuck. He'd never actually explained how he went higher in his head. Frustrated, Blake kicked at the ground, sending brilliant green leaves scattering into the air. _Useless._

 

"Hey," said a voice over her shoulder. Blake jumped to her feet, whirling around and raising both hands into a defensive position—at least, that was what she tried to do. In practice, all she managed to do was aggravate her injury.

 

"I'm so sorry!" Yang yelped, as Blake hissed in pain and shock. She hurried over, hands hovering over the wound but never quite touching it.

 

"I'm fine," Blake mumbled. "Just startled."

 

"Did I sneak up on you?" Yang sounded somewhere between disbelieving and amused.

 

"I guess you did." If that had been a Grimm, Blake would have died. _Right after I promised Ruby, too._

 

"Hey," Yang said again, snapping her fingers in front of Blake's nose. She jerked her head back, wincing as another twinge of pain started behind her left eye. "You seem kind of... out of it."

 

"It's my shoulder," Blake lied. "What are you doing out here, anyway?"

 

"I wanted to make sure you were okay." Yang scratched at the back of her neck, clearly uncomfortable. "You seemed kind of... not."

 

"I'm fine. I just need some time to think."

 

"Look, uh..." Yang stepped forward and put a hand between Blake's shoulderblades. She tensed, and Yang moved back again. "I can't help but feel like it's a bad idea to let you stew on this... whatever it is."

 

"I'm not stewing," Blake mumbled. Neither she nor her partner were at all convinced.

 

Yang, after a moment's hesitation, sat down on the rock and patted the space next to her. It was barely large enough for two, but Blake's shoulder was hurting and the slight breeze she'd been so enamored with when she first emerged from underground was starting to feel cold, so she joined her partner.

 

"So. What's eating you?" Blake narrowed her eyes in suspicion. Yang didn't _usually_ make those kinds of jokes, but when she did they tended to come out of _nowhere_ when Ruby wasn't in earshot. There was no sign of amusement on her face, though, only concern.

 

Blake sighed. "It's nothing."

 

"No, it isn't. If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine, but please don't lie."

 

Wincing, Blake lowered her head. "I keep thinking about that lake."

 

"The one spawning the Grimm?" Blake nodded mutely, eyes fixed on the forest floor. A gust of wind rustled the dead leaves lying on the ground, sending them skidding across the dirt.

 

"What about it?" Yang asked. "I mean, specifically."

 

"What it means. About... going forward." The words came slowly, haltingly, and even as she spoke them Blake could barely piece together what she was saying. None of it made sense, but Yang nodded in apparent understanding.

 

"I know we've talked about it a few times before... you never really told us what you thought, though."

 

"What am I supposed to think?" Blake found herself clutching her knee with her good hand, hard enough that her knuckles were going white. All except for the faint pink mark that had been left when she'd bitten them. "I don't understand how everyone else is just... _fine._ The world is going to end, and there's nothing we can do about it! That's not something I can forget!" Her voice rose to a near shout, before she caught herself and lowered it to a whisper.

 

Yang, who had been looking more and more panicked since Blake had started talking, reached out and rested an arm on her back. "We're not fine, you know," she said softly, after a moment. "Not just like that. I'm still trying to process things. Ruby… this shook her more than anything I've ever seen before. She's getting better, but I don't think she's back to normal yet. And Weiss... it's sort of hard to tell what she's thinking, but I know she's upset."

 

"It's different." Blake broke eye contact, turning to look over her shoulder at the forest around them.

 

"I don't think it is. We're all dealing with it in our own way."

 

Blake didn't answer. Instead she stared off into space, and before long her mind had wandered back to the black sludge trapped underground, churning with newborn Grimm. She wasn't sure she wanted to know why they were keeping humanity alive. Knowing would make her responsible for it. She found herself wishing she didn't know it was there at all. _Just like the SDC. So long as they don't_ know _they're hurting their workers, it's not their problem._

 

"There's something else, isn't there?" Looking up, startled, Blake found that Yang was looking at her. "Something's bothering you, and I don't think it's just that."

 

Defeated, Blake glanced away. She didn't want to meet her partner's eyes, not right after she'd been reminded of how frighteningly perceptive she could be. The question of what they were being preserved for was already haunting her, and it had been less than a week. She wouldn't put that on Yang, not after she'd practically carried her the last few miles through the cave. Not when she was already taking on more than her fair share in their partnership.

 

Blake was spared further questioning when Yang's scroll went off. Her own followed suit seconds later, and the pair of them picked up at almost the same time.

 

"Where are you?" Weiss demanded from the other end of the line. "We need to go."

 

"What? Are we under attack?" Something told Blake that if they _were,_ there would probably be more background noise.

 

Weiss said something to someone else, though Blake couldn't quite catch it, then returned to her scroll. "Ozpin called. There's a Nevermore a few miles away from us, they can't get the airship to our location without attracting its attention. We need to walk for a while to meet up with it." Yang, who had presumably received the same information from whoever had called her—probably Ruby—gestured off toward the trees. Blake nodded, told Weiss they'd be right there, and hung up.

 

They rejoined the rest of their class fairly quickly, though Blake was a bit taken aback by how far she'd wandered without even noticing. If Adam knew she'd gotten that lax with her situational awareness... well, it probably wouldn't matter much in the face of everything _else_ she'd done that he'd find appalling, but still.

 

"We gotta go north," Jaune said, gesturing to the west. Pyrrha grabbed his hand and moved it so that it was pointing the right way, making him flush. She seemed to be making a concerted effort not to be amused by this, while Russel snickered unabashedly in the background.

 

To Blake's surprise, when they finally set out it was Pyrrha, not Yang, who stepped forward to support her weight.

 

"I wanted to talk for a moment," she explained, glancing apologetically at Yang. "Besides, I'm sure you're exhausted."

 

Yang gave Blake a look that probably meant something like, _'Any idea what this is about?'_ She responded with a lopsided shrug that still made her bad shoulder twinge painfully. Then, she accepted Pyrrha's offered arm and started walking. Or, well, staggering.

 

"What's up?" she managed, after the two of them had found enough of a rhythm that Blake didn't keep tripping over half-buried rocks and straining her shoulder.

 

"I thought about what you said." It took Blake a moment to place the reference, and she felt her face burn with an irrational sense of shame. She'd shared a bit more than she probably should have, in retrospect.

 

"Oh."

 

Pyrrha coughed, sounding nearly as uncomfortable as she was. "I... well. I'm not sure how I'd go about following that advice, but I think I've found something that works for me. So... thank you."

 

"May I ask what it is?" Blake wasn't sure why she wanted to know—maybe it was just an appealing distraction, though she thought some of it was concern.

 

After a long pause, Blake craned her neck to look over at Pyrrha. She seemed lost in thought. Then, finally, "Do you believe in destiny?"

 

Blake frowned. "No, not really."

 

"I don't mean a predetermined fate, more... more like an end goal. Something to work towards."

 

She thought about it a moment. "In that case, I think my destiny has changed too many times for me to really believe in it."

 

Pyrrha nodded acceptance, then continued on. "I've always wanted to be a huntress, but I think my exact reasoning has changed. Before it was to play some part, no matter how small, in ridding the world of Grimm. But, well... that isn't likely to happen."

 

Blake nearly tripped again. Her head whipped around to stare at Pyrrha, who looked back in mild surprise. "I..." she started, then shook her head. "Sorry. I just... it seemed like you agreed with Jaune and Ruby. That we'd fix it, somehow."

 

"I want to believe that." Pyrrha shrugged helplessly, with only one shoulder so as not to jostle Blake. "Even so, I can't even imagine how we could possibly fight a horde of monsters whose numbers are never depleted."

 

"Neither can I."

 

"But they can." Blake frowned, but let Pyrrha keep going. "I want to protect that sense of optimism, I suppose. It doesn't matter if I don't think we can win, because they do. Jaune really believes we can do this, together, and that means I have to try."

 

"That's not _fair!"_ She kept her voice low, barely, but she couldn't keep down the hot surge of anger that had sprung up out of nowhere. "You can't just _put_ that on someone, least of all yourself."

 

Pyrrha smiled, and the sight of it infuriated her for some reason she couldn't place. "I want to," she said simply. "I want to keep fighting, as long as I have something to protect. I think your advice helped me expand on that. I want to keep hope alive in people."

 

For a moment, Blake just gaped at her. Sometimes she couldn't help but wonder if Pyrrha was really some kind of alien or demigod, placed on an imperfect world entirely by mistake.

 

"That's..." she started to say, but failed to find words. _False hope,_ part of her was screaming. Built on a self-told lie. That sort of hope was, as she'd learned, heartbreaking and fragile, liable to shrivel up the second you looked at it too closely. But that was what she wanted for Ruby, wasn't it? For her to keep smiling?

"Are you alright?" Pyrrha asked, clearly concerned.

 

"Fine." Blake's voice was more of a croak than anything else. "We should probably get back to our teams." Then, when Pyrrha started to look even more worried, "Thank you. I don't know if I understand all of it, but... thank you."

 

Pyrrha was kind enough to help her stumble her way back to her team, who glanced at the two of them with mild curiosity and, when they noticed the look on Blake's face, anxiety. "I'm fine," she mumbled, fully on automatic at this point. All three of them glared at her.

 

"You're a terrible liar," Weiss snapped. "Don't bother."

 

Blake mustered up a half smile for Pyrrha, who shot her one final concerned glance and then fell back towards where the rest of her team were trailing along behind them. Then, wincing as she did so, she turned to her friends. Ruby was staring at her, her eyes shimmering like quicksilver, and Blake could actually _feel_ her resolve starting to crumble. She looked away quickly, alarmed. _That's the last time I make fun of Weiss for falling for that._

 

"I'm not fine," she admitted. "Hopefully I will be. Until then... I'll manage." The others didn't look satisfied, exactly, but they let the matter drop.

They'd only been walking for a few minutes when Yang called out, "Guys!" She was pointing somewhere up ahead of them. "I see the airship!"

 

Blake forgot her foul mood for a moment and joined in the cheers, feeling giddy and weightless. The ship wasn't more than a few hundred yards away, mostly hidden behind a fringe of trees. As they drew closer to it, she could see two people standing outside the door. One of them waved. Blake recognized his gray hair—he was, presumably, Ruby and Yang's uncle. And the other...

 

"Winter?" Weiss' mouth was gaping open. It would've been funny if Blake hadn't been in the middle of realizing that she hadn't put her bow back on—and that Winter was looking right at them. Her ears pinned back against her skull, as though they were trying to hide in her hair.

 

They didn't run to the airship. Blake wasn't sure if she was glad about that or not—on the one hand, she doubted it would be pleasant trying to move quickly with her shoulder. On the other, their slow approach came with all the anxiety and cold dread of a gallows march.

 

"Hey!" The tall man, Qrow, jogged out to meet them. He still hadn't shaved, but he was beaming as he leaned down to ruffle Ruby's hair. She squeaked, trying ineffectually to bat his hand away. Blake edged behind Yang, while Weiss shifted nervously from foot to foot. Winter Schnee stalked toward them, her stride measured and unhurried. Her gaze passed right over Blake, focusing instead on Weiss. She smiled. It didn't show teeth.

 

"It's so good to see you!" Weiss exclaimed. Blake noticed that she was fidgeting with her hair.

 

"Are you hurt?"

 

Weiss shook her head. Winter nodded, as though she'd checked something off a list. "We should board. The Grimm will notice a group this size." She gestured imperiously at Qrow. He smirked back, then waved the rest of their class past him with one arm. Ruby was hanging off the other.

 

Blake followed after Yang, wincing as they made their way up a set of fold-out stairs and into the airship. Its interior seemed very dark compared to the bright forest they'd just left, but the gentle hum of machinery in the background was strangely reassuring.

 

"Make yourselves at home," Qrow grunted, gesturing vaguely at a few rows of plastic seats. "We've got food." Twelve ravenous teenagers turned and stared at him with single-minded intensity. He pointed toward a cooler nestled in a nearby corner.

 

When Ruby and Yang made to follow teams JNPR and CRDL, he put out a hand. "Nah, I got yours right here." He then produced a pair of what looked like sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, tossing one to each of them. "She's got the other two." He jerked a thumb at Winter.

 

She scowled at him for a moment, lip curling, then gave Weiss an identical package. There was another in her right hand, which she extended toward Blake. They locked eyes for a moment. Weiss tensed, ready to step between them.

 

Blake took her sandwich. Weiss needn't have worried—she was far too hungry to argue, just then. She'd eaten half of it before she noticed it was tuna. It was, as far as she could tell, the only one. She'd probably be worried about that later, when she wasn't so famished.

 

The rest of their class was soon sitting in the main cabin of the airship, and there was the telltale rumble of takeoff. Their flight was smooth enough that most of team RWBY, still standing near the entrance, had no trouble keeping their balance. Blake lurched when they first left the ground, but Yang reached out to steady her. After that, she stood unaided.

 

All four sandwiches were gone within seconds. Qrow was laughing, whether at the way they'd devoured the food or the slightly uncomfortable expression on Winter's face, Blake neither knew nor cared. She was too busy licking crumbs off her fingers.

 

Yang and Ruby were soon giggling along with their uncle. Ruby poked at the stubble on his chin. Yang told him he looked drunker when he was sober. He bore both with good humor—Blake didn't see him stop grinning once. She was more worried about the other half of the welcoming party. Weiss was staring at her sister, visibly struggling to suppress her own enthusiasm.

 

"I thought you were still in Atlas," she said, after a moment.

 

"I was. When I heard your team had gone missing, the General agreed to send me here, instead."

 

Weiss bit her lip. "I'm sorry, I—"

 

"Don't be ridiculous." Winter's severe expression softened. "Glynda Goodwitch followed your class into that cave, when you stopped responding. She found your packs."

 

Winter stepped forward and drew Weiss into a tight hug. Blake was standing at just the right angle to see the gobsmacked look on her friend's face. She tensed for a moment, as though completely unsure of what to do, then slowly relaxed.

 

"I was worried about you," Winter said quietly. Weiss' mouth was hanging open, and Blake couldn't quite decide if that was sweet or just depressing.

 

"I'm okay. Really."

 

"Of course you are." Winter straightened up. She was all business again, but there was still a small smile lingering on her face. Blake turned away, belatedly realizing that the two of them might want to talk privately. She was left standing awkwardly between the two reunions, hugging her injured arm to her chest. Anyone who knew where she was and would have worried about her had been with her in those caves.

 

She stayed like that for a moment, wondering what it would have been like to see her parents aboard the ship. Then, "Oi!" Blake nearly jumped out of her skin, whirling around to find Qrow looking at her. Her fingers twitched convulsively, but she didn't go for Gambol Shroud. Maybe that was because Ruby had draped her arms around his neck like a scarf, and he'd placed one hand on Yang's shoulder.

 

"Yes?" she prompted.

 

"You're Yang's partner." It wasn't a question. Yang gave her a discreet thumbs-up.

 

"I am."

 

He made a come-hither gesture with his free hand. Blake noticed that it was adorned with several silver rings. She took a step forward. He rolled his eyes and strode over to her, dragging his nieces along with him. Then he reached out and prodded her shoulder. She jerked away from him, ears flattening.

 

"You'll need to get that looked at," he pointed out.

 

"I know." Qrow seemed amused by the look on her face. Blake wondered if he was always this irritating.

 

"Look kid, Yang told me you helped get her and Ruby out of there. I wanted to say thanks, for looking out for them." His voice was gruff, but affectionate. It reminded her suddenly and powerfully of her father.

 

Blake looked away, feeling ashamed. She hadn't been as attentive as she should have been, especially once she'd seen that lake. How many times had she let Grimm sneak up on them, because she was too distracted?

 

She turned back to Qrow, opening her mouth to tell him as much, but he interrupted her by clapping her on her good shoulder. "We brought a medic with us," he said, jabbing a thumb toward a door in the cabin. "Go let her look at your shoulder. Infections are a bitch, trust me."

 

Nodding, Blake retreated to the door he'd indicated. There was indeed a doctor inside, a friendly-looking woman with a shock of bright purple hair. She said a lot of things Blake didn't really pay enough attention to, then started fussing over her shoulder. She was also kind enough not to say anything when Blake wiped at her eyes.

 

As soon as the medic was finished cleaning and stitching up her arm, she wandered back into the cabin. Her team had colonized a group of chairs near one window, and Ruby was leaning halfway out of hers to stare at the forest below them. Blake sat down in an empty seat next to Yang, then slumped bonelessly.

 

"We made it," she said, after a moment. "We're alive." It still seemed strangely unreal.

 

"I know, right?" Ruby turned to face them, brimming with enthusiasm as usual. "We did it! Now we can tell Ozpin about that weird lake thing, and I bet he'll know what to do!" Yang grinned at her.

 

"There's no doubt he's a great huntsman, but that does _not_ mean he'll know how to kill the unkillable Grimm horde," Weiss pointed out. "Still, there's hope that he can horribly inconvenience them."

 

Yang snorted. "That should be our new euphemism. You know, search and destroy: where you go out and inconvenience a bunch of Grimm."

 

"That's kinda sad," Ruby said, pouting. "Obliterate has a nicer ring to it."

 

"Well, if you ever figure out how to do that," Weiss suggested, "Make sure to let me know."

 

"Pfft. As if you wouldn't be there when we discovered it. Ooh, I hope it's some kind of ancient uber-weapon!"

 

Blake was suddenly blinking back tears. _As if you wouldn't be there._ She knew the words had been directed at Weiss, but it was equally obvious that Ruby would've said the exact same thing to her. She really did belong here.

 

Slowly, cautiously, as though it wasn't quite sure where it was or how it had got there, a smile crept across her face. _This,_ whatever it was, seemed like the answer to the question that had been driving her insane. Of course she'd be there, if Ruby somehow managed to defy whatever laws governed their universe and end the interminable threat the Grimm presented.

 

She didn't have the kind of faith it took to trust herself, or even the people around her, to kill the Grimm. She couldn't look the truth straight in the face without a care in the world, the way Ren and Nora seemed to. She certainly didn't want to fight and die just so that she would have _tried_ to do something about the Grimm. It was noble, maybe, but felt so bleak and meaningless that she couldn't imagine committing to it.

 

And yet... she was going to stay at Beacon. No alternatives had even crossed her mind since she'd seen the black lake. And, when she asked herself _why,_ the answer was blindingly simple. There was nowhere else she'd rather be.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... yeah! The end, and all that. I may be back with something else at a later date, but I may not. I'm trying (keyword trying) to get myself to start writing more original fiction, though I have literally no idea whether or not I'll get struck with another random idea like this one^. Aaaand if I'll then have the follow-through to actually write it out.
> 
> Thanks a ton to everyone who's given feedback, positive or negative! It's super helpful, especially for identifying issues to fix in the future or just giving me the motivation to keep writing!
> 
> ...
> 
> See, there's a reason I don't usually write author's notes. No idea what to say. Er, bye I guess?


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